THE PRIEST -POET 






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John 



Bannister Tabb 
The Priest-Poet 



By M. S. PINE ^ ^su-i-* c^ A 

Author of Alma Mater, and 
Other Dramas 




'They toil not, neither do they spin" — 
The blossom-Thoughts that here within 
The garden of my soul arise. 

Immortelles 



Published for 

Georgetown Visitation Convent 

Washington, D. C. 

1915 



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Copyright, 1915 

Munder-Thomsen Company 

All rights reserved 



NOV ?0 1915 ^„,,.!™'!il''. 

Bait 

©CLA416722 



Munder-Thomsen Press 
Baltimore New York 



To 

Saint Joseph, the Spouse of Mary 

Beloved of Heaven and Earth 

This Litde Garden of Father Tabb's Poesy 

Is Gratefully and Lovingly 

Dedicated 



Digitized by the Internet Arciiive 
in 2010 witin funding from 
Tine Library of Congress 



Iittp://www.arcliive.org/details/jolinbannistertab01pine 



FOREWORD 

A miniature painted in France in 1578 by 
the artist Hilliard bears the inscription: "If one 
could but paint his mind!" Happier than 
the artist, the lyric singer can paint his soul in 
his poems, and our Priest-Poet has painted his 
in most exquisite miniature, so that the world is 
better for the gift. 

In this little volume I have been content, in 
the main, to put forth the delicate work of his 
poetic brush, as ijiy readers will agree. Indeed, 
I have more than once accused myself of pre- 
sumption in undertaking to comment upon the 
rare creations of one so far above me as the 
Reverend John Bannister Tabb. But admira- 
tion for the poet and respect for his memory, 
combined with my desire to make him known 
and loved, especially by the young, have urged 
me to so unequal a task. 

I may add that these chapters are founded 
upon a lecture I gave to the young ladies of a 
certain convent in 1907, chiefly upon the poems, 
for my knowledge of Father Tabb's biogra- 
phy was then even more meager than it will 
appear to those who peruse these pages. Last 
year, 19 14, 1 was asked by Mr. Charles Phillips, 
A.M., the poet and journalist, to enlarge the 
lecture for "The Monitor," of San Francisco; 



and since the appearance of the little serial, 
friends, readers, and teachers of repute have 
prevailed upon me to put it into permanent 
form. I comfort myself with the hope that 
ere long others will take up the task, too long 
neglected — for six suns have gone their round 
since our poet took his flight to a higher land — 
and with more easy means of research than 
Providence has placed in my power, will set 
before the admirers of the Poet of the Quatrain 
a worthy portrait of the man and a worthy esti- 
mate of his poetry and its influence. 

I take pleasure in acknowledging my great 
indebtedness to the Reverend M. F. Dinneen, 
D.D., the able, learned and kindly president of 
St. Charles College, for help and encourage- 
ment in my pleasant labors; to the Reverend 
D. A. Connor for a copy of his eulogy pro- 
nounced over the remains of Father Tabb, and 
to Mgr. T. S. Duggan and Mr. Francis A. Litz, 
A.M., for valued aids toward the biography 
of the poet. 

In conclusion, I would ask my kind readers 
to seek in the last chapter an urgent motive for 
the present publication, which is to be devoted 
to the attainment of the object there explained. 

M. S. Pine. 



CONTENTS 

I- Page 

Birth and Boyhood 1 1 

II. 
The Boy-Soldier of the Confederacy i6 

III. 
Prison Life. Sidney Lanier 19 

IV. 

Release from Captivity. Engages as 
Teacher. Alfred A. Curtis 22 

V. 

Enters the True Fold. Studies for the 
Priesthood 25 

VI. 

Professor in St. Charles College. "Bone 
Rules." With the Muses 28 

VII. 

Characteristics. His Gift of Humor. ... 32 

VIII. 

Theological Studies. Ordination to the 
Priesthood 38 

IX. 

Father Tabb's Poems Center in God. ... 41 

X. 

His First Published Volume of Poems. . 45 



XI. Page 

"Poems." "An Octave to Mary." 
"Lyrics." "The Rosary in Verse" .... 49 

XII. 

Mrs. Meynell's Selection of Verses. 
"Quips and Quiddits." "Later Poems" 53 

XIII. 

Estimate of His Poems. His Optimistic 
Spirit. 58 

XIV. 

His Love of Nature. Flower Poems. ... 63 

XV. 

Floral Lyrics — Continued 67 

XVI. 

Bird Lyrics 71 

XVII. 

Babyhood and Youth in Poesy 75 

XVIII. 

Father Tabb's Friendship with Sidney 
Lanier 81 

XIX. 

Friendship with Bishop Curtis. Uni- 
versal Brotherhood 86 

XX. 

Feasts of the Church. Christmas Poems. 91 



XXI. Page 

Passion Flowers and Easter Lilies 95 

XXII. 

Mary in His Verse. Dogmas 98 

XXIII. 
Consideration of Other Poems. Tragedy 
and Fancy 102 

XXIV. 

The Sonnets 107 

XXV. 

Personahty of the Poet 11 1 

XXVI. 

A (Sacrifice. "Consecration" 117 

XXVII. 

The Poet's Failing Sight 123 

XXVIII. 

Blindness. Decline of Health 128 

XXIX. 

Death of Father Tabb. Funeral Eulogy. 133 

XXX. 

Supplementary. Father Tabb's Sermon 
on The Assumption 144 

XXXI. 

A Memorial to the Poet-Priest 152 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 
THE PRIEST-POET 

CHAPTER I 

BIRTH AND BOYHOOD 

Poetry is the fragrance of the flower of beauty. 
Who can analyze fragrance, define it, describe 
it? It seems like a spiritual essence, so subtle 
and elusive in its sweetness, so exquisitely pene- 
trating, often so delicious and soothing in its 
effects. Now if beauty be the flower of God's 
creation and poesy its perfume, I think of all 
our modern poets none has entered more deeply 
into league with that divine beauty — none has 
stolen from its heart sweeter perfume to scatter 
in little phials of verse all over the world than 
John Bannister Tabb, — Father Tabb, to use the 
name dearer to our hearts, which designates the 
Catholic priest and poet of whom we are so 
justly proud. 

Father Tabb's "Lyrics" breathe the music of 
Ariel and exercise just as magical an influence 
over the thought and fancy; he discerns spiritual 
truth, indeed is ever seeking it hidden under the 
lovely forms and types of nature, and he out- 
pours his findings in a wealth of analogy which 
becomes a perennial treasure of moral musing 

[II] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

and lofty aspiration to the thoughtful mind, — 
one imbued, perhaps I must add, with a love of 
poetry and the subtle spiritual sense often found 
even in the heart of a child. 

Father Tabb's boyhood, I think, must have 
been spent with nature and with his own 
thoughts — beautiful hidden dreams and long- 
ings which no one, perhaps, not even his mother 
suspected. A strong, tender, beautiful, womanly 
character that mother was, an honor to the 
sunny Southland which has given to our country 
such noble types of womanhood. The poet's 
second volume of "Lyrics" is dedicated: 

TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER 

The Cowslip 

It brings my mother back to me, 
Thy frail, familiar form to see. 

Which was her homely joy; 
And strange that one so weak as thou 
Shouldst lift the veil that sunders now 

The mother and the boy. 

And still more he glorifies that' mother by 
inference in the poem, 

WOMAN 

Shall she come down and on our level stand? 

Nay, God forbid it ! May a mother's eyes — 
Love's earliest home, the heaven of Babyland, 

Forever bend above us as we rise! 

All the man is there — he goes beyond the en- 
chanted woods of chivalry, where the knight 

[12] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

bowed down to womanhood, back to the heaven 
of babyland and mother love. 

A scion of one of the oldest and wealthiest 
families of Virginia, whose members proudly 
claimed alliance with the descendants of George 
Washington and John Randolph, the future 
poet and priest, John Bannister Tabb, was born 
at The Forest, the family estate at Mattoax, 
near Richmond, Va., on March 22, 1845. ^lis 
father was Thomas Yelverton Tabb and his 
mother Marianna Bertrand Archer, from 
whose union sprang four children, of whom our 
poet was the third. With a family inheritance 
of more than a dozen broad and fertile planta- 
tions, and surrounded by a multitude of slaves, 
the boy grew up in an atmosphere of luxury. 
From his sixth year he had his own servants, 
one of whom, at that age of toy soldiers, he 
liberally offered to a tin peddler in exchange 
for a coveted piece of his shining ware. 

Surrounded by all the gracious home in- 
fluences, he used to boast that he learned to read 
and write at his mother's knee, where he learned 
his prayers. Later, under the careful training 
of a private tutor, whose instructions the neigh- 
boring children were allowed to share, mind and 
faculties were developed, and the seeds sown 
of that exquisite culture which in his verses has 
since enchanted the world. 

Reared amid the beautiful mountains of 
Virginia, what wonder that his heart turns back 

[13] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

to them in poesy? "Here nearer heaven I seem 
to be," he tells us. A noble sonnet, "The 
Mountain," no doubt commemorates the moun- 
tains of his native State: 

Thy shadow broods above me, and mine own 
Sleeps as a child beneath it. O'er my dreams 
Thou dost, as an abiding presence, pour 
Thy spirit. 

And with what human tenderness and pathos 
"The Lonely Mountain" tells its sorrow over 
the loss of one little bird's voice — its strains of 
miraculous power, 

A breath whose faintest echo farthest heard 
A mountain stirred. 

Can you not hear the heart of the poet 
breathing under it? I cannot divest myself of 
the thought that the bird is symbolic — that the 
"Mountain" chants a lament for a human loss, 
for the "one fond, familiar strain" of his own 
boy voice pealing out its happy salute in song 
to the resounding hills. 

At the age of fourteen, threatened with fail- 
ure of sight, he was compelled to give up his 
beloved books, his tutor performing the office 
of reading to him daily. This was the fore- 
shadowing of the supreme affliction which came 
upon him in his latest years, and which called 
forth such pathetic effusions from his artist-pen. 

[14] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

His passionate love of music, however, con- 
soled him in some measure, and during those 
three years of privation he devoted much time 
to practice on the piano. 



[TS] 



CHAPTER II 

THE BOY-SOLDIER OF THE CONFEDERACY 

John Tabb was scarce more than a boy when 
the Civil War broke out, and honor and duty 
at once led him to the defense of the Confed- 
eracy. Enlisting in the navy, he served as 
captain's clerk on the steamer Robert E. Lee, 
which ran the blockade at Wilmington, N. C, 
twenty-one times. His first voyage to England 
under that captain, in 1862, was memorized 
later by the appealing poem, 

OFF SAN SALVADOR 
It lay to westward — as of old, 
An emerald bar across the gold 
Of sunset — whence a vision grand 
First beckoned to the stranger-land. 

And on our deck, uncoffined, lay 
A child, whose spirit far away 
The wafture of an angel hand 
Late welcomed to a stranger-land. 

Subsequently he accompanied Colonel Stone 
to England as secretary. On board was a chap- 
lain of the Confederacy, Father Bannon, bound 
for Rome to enlist the sympathy of Pius IX. 
One day being on deck with his captain, the 
young secretary saw a gentleman of distin- 
guished appearance reading. Informed by his 
officer that the stranger was a priest, he ap- 

[16] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

preached Father Bannon and, with boyish sim- 
plicity, asked: "Are you a Catholic priest?" 
Receiving an affirmative answer, he paused a 
moment and then inquired: "Was your father 
a priest?" "No, my boy," said the chaplain, 
smiling. Young Tabb, not yet satisfied, pursued 
his family investigation: "Will your son be a 
priest?" "I think not," replied Father Bannon 
gently. "May I see the book you are reading, 
sir?" And the Father laid in the hands of his 
gifted questioner the breviary which was after- 
ward, when the graces of faith and vocation had 
been showered upon him, to become so inex- 
pressibly dear to his heart. 

One must remember the atmosphere of dense 
ignorance of Catholicity, surcharged with preju- 
dice, in which the youth had been reared, to ap- 
preciate the awakening of his mind during the 
voyage, for he and Father Bannon had many 
an interview and became good friends. 

Young Tabb continued to serve in the navy 
until June 4, 1864, when he was captured on 
the Siren — which had lost her anchor — off 
Beaufort, N. C, by the Federal ship. Key- 
stone State. In the "Lyrics," Father Tabb per- 
sonifies, in three deep and tender quatrains, 

THE LOST ANCHOR 

Ah, sweet it was to feel the strain, 
What time, unseen, the ship above 
Stood steadfast to the storm that strove 

To rend our kindred cords atwain! 

[17] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

To feel, as feel the roots that grow 
In darkness, when the stately tree 
Resists the tempests, that in me 

High Hope was planted far below! 

But now, as when a mother's breast 
Misses the babe, my prisoned power 
Deep-yearning, heart-like, hour by hour 

Unquiet aches in cankering rest. 

On the following day he, with four others, 
was taken to Old Point Comfort, where they 
were court-martialed. The youth's sense of 
humor did not forsake him even in the face 
of possible death. When his judges asked his 
place of residence, he replied: "England, 
France, Scotland, Bermuda and Canada," for 
he had visited all during his term of service. 
The captives were ordered to the prison at Point 
Lookout, known as the Bull Pen. Tabb, with 
characteristic generosity, shared fifty dollars he 
had equally with them; and as they were Eng- 
lishmen he labored for their release, which he 
obtained after two months' correspondence with 
the British Ambassador in Washington. 



[i8] 



CHAPTER III 

PRISON LIFE. SIDNEY LANIER 

The horrors of his prison Hfe were some- 
what mitigated by his meeting with Sidney 
Lanier, the Southern poet, prose-writer and 
critic. Eight dreary months of captivity united 
these gifted and ardent souls forever, and each 
became the alter ego of the other. Lanier's 
muse did not wholly forsake him in those dark 
hours, though sometimes Sorrow palsied it; 
and then the music of his flute brought solace 
and cheer to the two great-hearted victims of 
"The Lost Cause." Father Tabb's second 
book of "Lyrics" has immortalized 

LANIER's FLUTE 

When palsied at the pool of Thought 

The Poet's words were found, 
Thy voice the healing Angel brought 

To touch them into sound. 

Those months of youth spent in durance vile, 
during which he "supped full with horrors," 
remained ever burned upon heart and memory. 
His vivid description of those horrors still 
haunts the remembrance of many a student of 
St. Charles College, with the faculty of which 
he was so intimately associated for more than 
thirty years. 

[19] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABS 

Toward the close of his professorial term of 
1 899-1900, after a rather brief acquaintance 
by letter, I had the temerity to suggest that he 
should "go North" for the benefit of his health 
and his literary work. Here is the answer that 
came to me from Mattoax, Amelia County, Vir- 
ginia, on a hot July day: "I am amused at the 
plan you propose. In the first place, to go to 
the 'brain-cooling North' is the last of desires, 
for I am a Rebel unredeemed and unredeem- 
able, and should not feel at home there. Sec- 
ondly, had I the wish, the means are lacking." 

And in November, 191 1, accompanying a 
caricature with a doggerel verse attached, 
founded upon a White House incident which 
had affronted his Southern blood, there was the 
following note: "I am sending you a letter 
from Mrs. Meynell and with it the sketch she 
refers to. Keep both if you choose. Some of 
your girls will, I know, see the picture as does 
the 'irredeemable Rebel' that drew it. Your 
friend, John B. Tabb. — Eight months' confine- 
ment in a Northern prison makes me ever what 
lam!" 

But this dark memory never threw its shadow 
over his poetic inspirations. I have sought, and 
sought in vain, for one line that breathes of 
those troublous years of the Civil War. A 
marvelous reticence, indeed, which attests that 
the supernatural had swallowed up the natural 
as soon as he stepped with his Muse over the 

[20] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

border line of his divine Poesy. And his own 
words to me were: "I can do nothing in verse 
that is not directly imparted to me." The voice 
of his Muse was to him a divine voice. 



[21] 



CHAPTER IV 

RELEASE FROM CAPTIVITY. ENGAGES AS 
TEACHER. ALFRED A. CURTIS 

It was a clear day in February, 1865, when 
at last John Bannister Tabb and Sidney Lanier 
stepped forth freemen again into God's sun- 
shine. "I felt that I was in the kingdom of 
heaven," said the young scion of aristocracy as 
he went out into a new world of poverty and 
wrecked hopes, youth's dauntless energies still 
ruling the frail, broken body. 

A means of self-support must be found; and 
he turned with enthusiasm to his favorite art, 
music, determined to devote his life to its pur- 
suit. For a year and a half he gave seven 
hours or more daily to piano practice. But his 
patron's fortune suddenly collapsed, and with it 
the young musician's hopes ; with a heavy heart 
he yielded to fate, or rather to the mysterious 
overshadowings of Divine Providence, and gave 
up all prospect of a musical career. 

A position as teacher was now offered him in 
a school attached to Mt. Calvary Episcopal 
Church, Baltimore, then under the pastorate of 
the Rev. Alfred A. Curtis, whose face was al- 
ready turned toward Rome. Mt. Calvary was 
"High Church," and its pastor believed in the 
Blessed Sacrament, "said Mass," preached de- 

[22] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

votion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, and called 
himself a priest, wearing cassock and biretta. 
Young Tabb found in him a congenial spirit; 
he soon fell under his spiritual influence and 
regularly made his confession to him as to a 
trusted guide. And this influence was but deep- 
ened and strengthened when, a few years later, 
he obtained a more important position at Racine 
College, Michigan. 

Yet there was a hidden voice whispering to 
his heart of higher things than earth can give; 
and deeming it a call to the ministry, ere long 
he resigned his position and proceeded to the 
Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, Va., there 
to pursue a course of theological study — a 
course which was to be completed elsewhere, 
though he knew it not, and after a long period 
of waiting. 

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends." 
His revered director, Rev. Mr. Curtis, after 
the Conference of Bishops in Boston, realized 
with anguish of mind that there was no longer 
any hope of peace or salvation for him in the 
Anglican Church. At the close of 1871, after a 
correspondence with his Bishop, which forms 
one of the most interesting and thrilling chap- 
ters of his "Biography," he rent the ties which 
bound him to Anglicanism, and, resigning his 
pastorate, proceeded to Europe, where he re- 
paired at once to Oxford to consult Dr. New- 
man. 

[23] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

His course was followed with intense interest 
by his faithful disciple, whose longing for the 
truth was equally ardent, and whose admira- 
tion for the illustrious English divine, — for the 
wisdom, sincerity and holiness of his life, even 
more than for his profound works, already a 
familiar study to young Tabb, — led him to place 
a trust equally unshaken in the spiritual counsels 
of that great convert and guide of souls. Espe- 
cially was he touched with Dr. Newman's first 
prescription to his seeker after truth. Placing 
two books in Mr. Curtis' hands, the enlightened 
director said : "Read these if you like, but pray 
and pray; nothing will help you more than 
humble prayer." His doubts finally removed 
and his soul fixed in unchangeable peace, the 
happy neophyte was "reconciled to the Church" 
by Dr. Newman and baptized in his presence on 
May 10, 1872. 



[24] 



CHAPTER V 

ENTERS THE TRUE FOLD. STUDIES FOR THE 
PRIESTHOOD 

Mr. Tabb, profoundly moved, now studied 
and prayed more earnestly than ever; and when 
Mr. Curtis, shortly after his return from Eu- 
rope, entered St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore, 
to prepare for the priesthood, there was only 
question of following the footsteps of his guide. 
Ere the year came to an end John Bannister 
Tabb was enlisted among the most fervent and 
enthusiastic lovers of the Church of God. His 
intense love for the faith in its purity reminds 
one of Father Faber: he was a Catholic "from 
top to toe" from the moment he entered the 
fold, and to serve the Church was the pre- 
dominating passion of his life. 

How potently is the restless struggle of the 
soul — of the free will held back by worldly 
ties — portrayed from experience in "The 
Promontory" ! 

Not all the range of sea-born liberty 

Hath ever for one resdess wave sufficed: 

So pants the heart — of all compulsion free — 
Self-driven to the Rock, its barrier Christ. 

The sway of the new seminarian over him 
remained undiminished. "On the day of Father 
Curtis' ordination (December 19, 1874)," — a 

[25] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

brother Levite tells the story, — "he heard his 
first confession, the humble, hasteful penitent 
being Mr. Tabb, afterwards the noted poet- 
priest. Mr. Tabb, who had as a Protestant 
been his penitent, was now eager to claim his 
old Confessor's first care. 'I received so many 
absolutions before that did not count, I wanted 
one at least that did,' was his remark to the 
students." 

The biographer of Bishop Curtis gives a fur- 
ther paragraph of interest in regard to their 
mutual relations. "They had been the closest 
of friends; and years after, when Father Curtis 
became Bishop of Wilmington, in 1886, he reg- 
ularly visited his friend, often walking the five 
miles from the railroad station to St. Charles 
College. . . . Bishop Curtis was his con- 
soling angel in the hour of his greatest trial and 
darkness, when threatened with the loss of sight. 
Together they took long walks through the 
country recreating each other and exchanging 
reminiscences, one submitting to the criticism 
of his friend his latest verses, while the other 
cheered him by his encouragement. He sent 
the poet kind and loving messages from his 
deathbed, and bequeathed to him his chalice." 
Bishop Curtis died July 11, 1908, only a year 
and four months before his friend. 

Not long after Mr. Tabb's conversion, his 
conviction became assured that the priesthood 
was his vocation; despite his own opinion of his 

[26] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

unworthiness, his soul was well prepared( for 
this supreme grace by his purity of life, his love 
and practice of prayer, and the sacrifices that 
had been decreed by the loving Watcher and 
Guide of the souls of His elect, at every step 
of his youthful career. In 1874 he entered St. 
Charles College, Ellicott City, Md., to study 
for the priesthood. 



[27] 



CHAPTER VI 

PROFESSOR IN ST. CHARLES COLLEGE. "BONE 
RULES." WITH THE MUSES 

Having completed his preparatory classical 
studies, for which his early education and fine 
courses of reading had been an excellent train- 
ing-school, the aspiring student was now ready 
for entrance into St. Mary's Seminary to pur- 
sue those theological and Scriptural studies 
which were to bring him in four years to the 
goal of all his hopes. But just at this happy 
moment he met anew the shadowing angel, 
Sacrifice, which the Holy Spirit had sent ever 
before him even from childhood, to lure him 
from aught but the Divine Light and Will. 
The faculty of St. Charles, appreciating his high 
intellectual and literary culture and his marked 
qualifications as a preceptor, persuaded him to 
remain in the college as a teacher of English. 
In consequence, his ordination to the priesthood 
was postponed many years. 

He was a fine Greek scholar and delighted 
in teaching that language now and again to spe- 
cial pupils. His admirable memory had stored 
away long passages of the classic Greek authors 
which he recited with rare ease and force. But 
his affections were centered on his English class; 
and he made the hour one of perennial pleasure 

[28] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

as well as profit to his pupils. Not a moment 
was lost. The first half-hour was devoted to 
grammar — recitations, explanations, and black- 
board work. The poet's genius for illustration, 
which would have made him a pastmaster in that 
art, helped to hold the attention and engrave in 
the memory the facts he strove to impress upon 
his eager hearers. 

In his "Bone Rules, or Skeleton of English 
Grammar," first published in 1897, and which 
he sent me later, we discern clearly his method 
of teaching. The dedication page reads : 

INSCRIBED 

To my Pupils 

Active and Passive; Perfect and Imperfect; 

Past, Present', and Future, by Their 

Loving Father Tabb. 

The brevity and clearness which mark every 
page, the pithy explanatory notes, the copious 
quotations from the masters of English litera- 
ture, and even the comic procession of "Sen- 
tences to be corrected," many of them Father 
Tabb's own creation, render "Bone Rules" an 
easy and a helpful mode of studying grammar. 

But I have accounted for only half of the 
hour consecrated to English. Students of the 
poet could alone tell the enchantments "of those 
rare half-hours spent with him in the company 
of the Muses." Shakespeare's plays, read and 

[29] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

analyzed with rare psychological and poetical 
insight, awakened unbounded enthusiasm in his 
listeners. Shelley and Keats, as well as Edgar 
Allen Poe, each of whom he cherished with 
special appreciation, were studied and their ex- 
quisite imagery and musical diction brought 
strikingly to notice. 

Of his readings of the prose and poetry of 
that 

Sad spirit, swathed in brief mortality 
Of Fate and fervid fantasies the prey, 

Mr. T. S. Duggan, a gifted student of the poet, 
writes: "We ran with him through the full 
gamut of 'The Bells,' from their riotous roar 
to the softest tintinnabulations. And even the 
most apathetic was forced to wipe away a tear 
at realizing the full sadness of the untimely 
taking off of that 'rare and radiant maiden 
whom the angels name Lenore.' Toward the 
end of one session, the teacher went to the cor- 
ner of the classroom, crouched, and began to 
recite 'The Skylark.' The students were trans- 
fixed. When he had finished, he was on tiptoe 
at the opposite corner of the room, breathless, as 
if eager to follow the bird in its flight. In- 
stinctively the class broke out in applause. He 
modestly suppressed our enthusiasm with the 
remark: 'Gentlemen, did you see that Skylark 
soar? Did you hear him sing? If there is a 
single boy in this class who did not see that lark 
and hear him sing, I forbid him ever again to 

[30] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

open a book of poetry, for it would be a sheer 
waste of time.' Need it be said that most of 
those present saw the lark and heard him sing?" 
Each of these three poets has been honored 
with more than one memorial on Father Tabb's 
pages. Besides the sonnet entitled "Poe," be- 
ginning with the two lines cited above, a quat- 
rain is inscribed to 

POE-CHOPIN 
O'er each the soul of Beauty flung 

A shadow mingled with the breath 
Of music that the Sirens sung 

Whose utterance is death. 

In two rare sonnets he shows his devotion 
to Keats as well as in the double quatrain en- 
titled "Keats-Sappho" : 

Methinks when first the Nightingale 

Was mated to thy deathless song, 
That Sappho with emotion pale 

Amid the Olympian throng, 
Again, as in the Lesbian grove, 

Stood listening with lips apart, 
To hear in thy melodious love 

The pantings of her heart. 

In the sonnet, "At Keats' Grave," he apostro- 
phizes the dead poet: 

E'en death itself deals tenderly with thee: 
For here, the livelong year, the violets bloom 
And swing their fragrant censers till the tomb 

Forgets the legend of mortality. 



[31] 



CHAPTER VII 

CHARACTERISTICS. HIS GIFT OF HUMOR 

One of Robert Louis Stevenson's biographers 
said of him that with all his literary genius he 
would have been floored in a simple sum of 
proportion. Father Tabb had an equal ab- 
horrence of mathematics; he even refused to 
admit that he could add correctly. His love 
of the Church and her doctrines and discipline 
was impressed upon his pupils with strenuous 
energy. He said to some members of his class 
one day : "If I die before my ordination, while 
studying theology, I want my epitaph to read: 

'Sacred to the memory of John B. 
Tabb, D. D.' " 

The students smiled, and one ventured to say : 
"But you are not a Doctor of Divinity yet." 
"D.D. will not mean Doctor of Divinity when it 
is found on my tombstone," was the answer; 
"it will mean Died of Dogma." 

This passion for the Faith in its purity 
gleams like a ray of sunlight through his poems. 
"Epiphany" is a glorious confession: 

Reason, have done! 
Of thee I'll none 
While face to face I see the sun. 

[32] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Be thine the ray 
To point the way 
In darkness: but behold, 'tis day! 

Should Faith divine 
Forbear to shine, 
Again I'll place my hand in thine. 

For in thy sight 
To walk aright 
Is prelude to the perfect Light. 

Father Tabb had the faculty of genius in call- 
ing out latent talent in his students, which he 
fostered with generous and unremitting care. 
Indeed, he was ever at their service in class or 
out of class, for he had the overflowing heart of 
a father for the youths in his charge. His gen- 
erosity impelled him often to httle acts of kind- 
ness that boys love — some dainties out of time, 
a pair of skates at Christmas, a book for a 
birthday present. The gifts he himself received 
from friends were generally disposed of in this 
way; and of his own published works he was a 
liberal donor. 

Yet beloved as his pupils were, he would 
have no scenes at parting; he had no fancy for 
saying good-by. Commencement Day found 
him slipping out of the back door and down 
through the woods to the Virginia Station long 
before they and his numerous friends were free 
to utter that unpleasant word in his ear. 

It was characteristic of him, too, to keep in 
the shade during celebrations or receptions of 

[33] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

distinguished visitors. One day he was particu- 
larly requested to be on hand to help entertain 
four Bishops who were hourly expected. The 
smile on his face could not be misinterpreted. 
He was soon out of sight down in his beloved 
haunts in the woods, where he spent the day. 
As the whistle told him late in the afternoon 
that the honored guests had departed, he saun- 
tered back to the college. On the way one of 
the faculty met him and asked: "Why didn't 
you stay and see the Bishops?" "I didn't want 
to see my forefathers (four Fathers)," was the 
witty rejoinder. 

In the same spirit of distaste for great func- 
tions he declined an invitation of the Reverend 
Father (now Monsignor) Mackin, of Wash- 
ington, to be present at the laying of the corner- 
stone of St. Paul's Church, of which he was 
pastor. Here are Father Tabb's "Regrets": 

St. Peter is the cornerstone, 

And if you build on Paul, 

I greatly fear 

Ere many a year 
Your Church is doomed to fall. 

So pray excuse 

If I refuse 
To heed your invitation, 

Or have no heart 

To take a part 
In such a Mackin-ation. 

He possessed the gift of humor in an ex- 
traordinary degree. His jokes, repartees, and 

[34] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

comic bits of verse seemed to come from an in- 
exhaustible source. But his wit was ruled by 
good nature, and was kindly toward others, 
though often directed unmercifully toward him- 
self. He took delight in unearthing a tradition 
of the colored mammy who received him at his 
birth and who bore him in puris naturalibus 
through the mansion, that the entire household 
might see "the homeliest baby ever born in Vir- 
ginia." I have no doubt that a profound spirit 
of humility was fostered underneath all the 
ridicule which he vented upon his tall spare 
form and prominent features. 

On one occasion I had expressed my appre- 
ciation of his verses in unmeasured terms — 
terms which in no wise approached their merit; 
and shortly after, with a cordial New Year 
answer (1903), came a pencil sketch of the 
poet, to which he referred as follows : "To 
disabuse your notion of the 'poet,' I send you 
a matter-of-fact, honest presentment of the 

'man' who is always, dear , Your servant 

in Christ, John B. Tabb." Below the little 
cartoon was the slanderous verse : 

This is the Catholic priest 
Who in piety never increased. 

With the world and the devil 

He kept on a level 
Tho' from flesh he was wholly released, 

I will venture to quote a bit of his humor 
from a friend's letter. A lady in Cairo, Egypt, 

[35] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

having written to Father Tabb for a copy of 
his poems, he answered her: "I am not sur- 
prised that you, who are sojourning in a land 
where the cat was once worshiped, should desire 
to hear the mews (Muse) of the Tabb-y." 

His democratic principles are illustrated in 
the Cinderella rhymes styled "High and Low." 

A boot and a shoe and a slipper 
Lived once in the Cobbler's Row; 

But the boot and the shoe 

Would have nothing to do 
With the slipper, because she was low. 

But the King and the Queen and their daughter 
On the Cobbler chanced to call ; 

And as neither the boot 

Nor the shoe would suit, 
The slipper went off to the ball. 

Two unconscious lovers he celebrates with 
still more comic effect in 

THE TRYST 

Potato was deep in the dark underground, 

Tomato above in the light; 
The little Tomato was ruddy and round. 

The little Potato was white. 
And redder and redder she rounded above, 

And paler and paler he grew; 
And neither suspected a mutual love 

Till they met in a Brunswick stew. 

[36] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Here in a new aspect appears "The Wood- 
pecker." 

The wizard of the woods is he, 

For in his daily round, 
Whene'er he finds a rotting tree. 

He makes the timbers sound. 

Most of my readers will remember the train 
of events resulting so disastrously for the 
Church in France during Premier Combes' 
administration, Pius X then occupying the 
Papal throne. The lampoon cited below, 
founded upon this period, was sent me by a 
friend in 1905 ; I have never seen it in print. 

THE ISSUE 

In France they question now: Is Combes' 
The right of teaching Faith, or Rome's? 
"That Pius Fraud," thinks Combes, "shall see 
That I am master here, not he." 
While thinks the Pope: "Since Peter's day 
All little Cocks, Combes, crow that way." 



[37] 



CHAPTER VIII 

THEOLOGICAL STUDIES. ORDINATION TO THE 
PRIESTHOOD 

After so long and painful a postponement 
of his ardent aspirations for the priesthood, 
Mr. Tabb's professorial labors at St. Charles 
were intermitted and he entered the Seminary. 
His theological studies were completed toward 
the end of 1884. A spiritual Retreat followed, 
wholly devoted to solitude and earnest prepara- 
tion for the stupendous dignity to which he was 
about to be elevated. 

Holy Orders were conferred upon him dur- 
ing the Ember Week of Advent, December 20, 
by Archbishop Gibbons, in the Cathedral of 
the Assumption, Baltimore. It was in the Col- 
lege Chapel, at the Midnight Mass of Christ- 
mas, that he had the consoling privilege of 
offering the Divine Victim to His Eternal 
Father for the first time ; and so deeply affected 
was he by the greatness and sacredness of the 
act that he would celebrate only that one Mass, 
although the Church allows her priests to say 
three on the solemn Feast of the Nativity of 
Christ. At the close of the Gospel he turned 
and addressed his audience in brief but impres- 
sive terms, referring with affectionate gratitude 
to the beautiful chalice he had just used, it being 

[38] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

a testimonial of the love and appreciation of 
his pupils. His heart overflowed in thanks- 
giving to Almighty God, who permitted him to 
celebrate his first Mass in the Chapel so dear to 
him; and he expressed an ardent desire that 
after a life consecrated to his beloved pupils, 
he might offer the Holy Sacrifice for the last 
time within its hallowed walls. 

God heard his prayer and granted it in full- 
ness, for from that day until the day of his 
death the gifted priest-poet was a part of the 
college. He gave to it the service of his whole 
being; and the angels alone could measure the 
height of moral, spiritual, and literary influence 
which he exerted not only on those who came 
under his gentle academic sceptre, but on hosts 
of friends and strangers alike by his counsels, 
his cultured conversation, his kindly, helpful 
letters — each a veritable multum in parvo — and 
by his published poems. 

He added fame and distinction to the already 
famous institution founded by Charles Carroll 
of Carrollton for "the education of pious young 
men of the Catholic persuasion for the ministry 
of the Gospel," as its ancient Maryland charter 
states. His "Poems" and "Lyrics" were read 
and appreciated by an ever-widening circle of 
cultured admirers wherever the English lan- 
guage is spoken. 

The assertion has been ventured that his 
diamonds of verse were more prized in England 

[39] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

than in the country that gave them birth; but 
for my part I would not so wrong the American 
mind as to believe it. Yet now that the hand 
which wrought such unique gems is stilled in 
death — and not one other to hold out such a 
casket for centuries, perhaps — let us not leave 
these priceless treasures to lie on dusty shelves. 
Let us love and study them and lead others to 
penetrate their beauty; let us hold them in rev- 
erence for their spiritual and educative power. 
For, indeed, all the truth that Father Tabb 
teaches does not lie open on the surface : often 
beneath his inspired words are little crypts of 
thought-symbol into which we must descend with 
our torches of love and intelligence if we would 
pierce the depth of the wisdom and beauty 
hidden there. 



[40] 



CHAPTER IX 

FATHER TABB's POEMS CENTER IN GOD 

Father Tabb's sacred poems are gems of the 
sanctuary. They are peculiarly the treasures 
of the Church ; they are stately with her majestic 
dogmas; tender and pathetic with her mysteries 
of love and joy and sorrow; glowing with her 
beautiful ritual and the splendor of her Feasts : 
her moral code, the repentance of the sinner, 
the mystical union of the soul with God, and, 
above all, the divine lessons of the Master 
drawn from parable and miracle and doctrine, 
minister in turn light and comfort to our hearts, 
and exquisite pleasure to our minds under these 
brief poetic creations, "imparted," no doubt, 
many of them, in the very presence of the 
Master. 

Indeed, there is scarcely a poem which has 
not for us this embassy of sweetness, of uplift, 
of comfort; even the playful fancies in lighter 
vein bring a smile to the hps, but a deeper smile 
to the heart. And often, as we read, love and 
memory embalm the lines almost without effort, 
so enchanting is their melody, so sweet the 
awakened emotions of surprise, and so insistent 
the lesson that pierces down to the deeps of our 
nature. How many thousands, I wonder, can 
today repeat, and each time with increasing 

[41] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

pleasure, if not with fuller comprehension, the 
little Christmas verse steeped in the fragrance 
of Heaven, 

OUT OF BOUNDS 

A little Boy of heavenly birth, 

But far from home today, 
Comes down to find His ball, the Earth, 

That Sin has cast away. 
O comrades, let us one and all 
Join in to get Him back His ball ! 

It is a sermon, or, rather, many mission ser- 
mons abridged in a wonderful picture. The 
"little Boy" — the Word eternally born in the 
bosom of the Father; the Earth, the ball that 
He holds in the hollow of His httle hand; the 
monster Sin that has cast it away, with the 
whole human race, so dear to His heart! And 
the closing soul-cry to us all to become apostles 
inflamed with boundless zeal to save the souls 
He has come so "far from home" to redeem! 
But who could translate into words the deep 
and sublime conceptions this little verse en- 
genders in the heart? 

Father Tabb puts a maximum of meaning 
into a minimum of words; he cherishes struc- 
tural simplicity, while the transcendent energy 
of his mind carries you away with a kind of 
momentum over gaps of thought that take away 
your breath, as, among scores of others, in the 
last couplet of "Recognition" — a happy title. 

[42] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

When Christ went up to Calvary 

His crown upon His head, 
Each tree unto its fellow-tree 

In awful silence said: 
"Behold the Gardener is He 
Of Eden and Gethsemane!" 

And here is a triplet, the prayer of a contem- 
plative soul. I avow that when my eyes first 
lit upon it my heart almost stood still at the 
depth and exaltation of the thought. 

GOD 
I see Thee in the distant blue, 
But in the violet's dell of dew 
Behold, I breathe and touch Thee, too. 

Do you remember how St. Gertrude, picking 
a flower and Inhaling Its fragrance, almost fell 
into an ecstasy of love at the thought that her 
Lord had created that lovely flower "to give 
pleasure to His little Gertrude"? Enierson 
says somewhere : "Nature Is the Incarnation of 
a thought. . . . Man imprisoned, man 
crystallized, man vegetative, speaks to man Im- 
personated." Father Tabb, with an exquisite 
adaptation of the miracle recorded In St. Mark, 
fifth chapter, reveals his conception of God in 
His creation. 

NATURE 
It is His garment; and to them 
That touch in faith the utmost hem, 
He turning says again: "I see 
That virtue is gone out from me." 

[43] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Are not these three poems emanations of a 
heart which had found its center in God, whose 
attributes are revealed to him through the trans- 
parent medium of His glorious works? All the 
"Nature Lyrics" — and they superabound — 
chant in notes of deathless beauty the truth 
enunciated in the first lines of "Resurrection" : 

All that springeth from the sod 
Tendeth upwards unto God. 

May I say it with all reverence? As one 
cannot penetrate the meaning, discern all the 
beauty, and draw all the sweetness and divine 
unction from a verse of Scripture without re- 
reading, without tasting each word in the silent 
pauses of the soul, so, to my mind, much of 
Father Tabb's poetry will yield up its full har- 
vest of inner meaning and outer loveliness only 
to the student who dedicates himself lovingly 
and leisurely to the enchantment of his verse. 

To read the subjoined poem alone is to feel 
the force of my suggestion. 

DEUS ABSCONDITUS 

My God has hid Himself from me 
Behind whatever else I see; 
Myself — the nearest mystery — 
As far beyond my grasp as He. 

And yet in darkest night, I know, 
While lives a doubt-discerning glow. 
That larger lights above it throw 
These shadows in the vale below. 



[44] 



CHAPTER X 

HIS FIRST PUBLISHED VOLUME OF POEMS 

Father Tabb's first modest volume of poems 
was printed privately in 1884; there is no ref- 
erence to date or publisher in the copy I have. 
The lyrics, nineteen in number, are beautiful 
and refined, opening with "The Cloud," and 
closing with "The Rhyme of the Rock," the 
longest of all. These are followed by "Son- 
nets," several of which are republished in later 
volumes. There is one Sonnet on "Columbus" 
which is a finely drawn analogy between St. 
Christopher 

who on his shoulders bore, 
Across the torrent to the welcome shore, 
The Infant Christ, 

and our Columbus, who was led 

westward o'er the wandering main, 
Christ-laden, to the land whereof no gleam 
Had cleft the compass of the narrower brain. 

Another Sonnet whose fourteen lines con- 
jure up in fair dreamland some of the great 
character-creations of tragic literature, will not 
prove unacceptable in full to my readers. To 
quote "The Arte of English Poesie," 

[45] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

If Poesie be, as some have said, 
A speaking picture to the eye, 

then Father Tabb has nobly achieved the 
artist's function and superadded the grace of a 
third art by the musical rhythm of his num- 
bers in 

Shakespeare's mourners 

I saw the grave of Shakespeare in a dream, 
And round about it grouped a wondrous throng, 
His own majestic mourners, who belong 

Forever to the Stage of Life, and seem 

The rivals of reality. Supreme 

Stood Hamlet, as erewhile the graves among. 
Mantled in thought: and sad Ophelia sung 

The same swan-dirge she chanted in the stream. 

Othello, dark in destiny's eclipse, 

Laid on the tomb a lily. Near him wept 

Dejected Constance. Fair Cordelia's lips 

Moved prayerfully the while her father slept. 

And each and all, inspired of vital breath. 
Kept vigil o'er the sacred spoils of death. 

A good deal to my surprise, I have found no 
other tribute to the Bard of Avon in Father 
Tabb's collection of verse than an octet, full of 
pathos, which will fit In here, although it 
appears in the book of "Poems" of 1894. 

yorick's skull 

Poor Jester! still upon the stage, 

Chap-fallen flung, 
Where merry clowns from age to age 

Thy dirge have sung; 

[46] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Yet more than Eloquence may reach, 

Thought-heights among: 
'Tis thine, humanity to teach, 

Sans brains or tongue, 

A beloved name, Cardinal John Henry New- 
man, shines on the Dedication page of this 
volume not alone in the formal inscription, but 
in a sonnet, which breathes the deepest rever- 
ence and affection. Another tribute of the heart 
to His Eminence opens the sequence of "Son- 
nets" under date of May, 1879, the month 
in which the great Oratorian received the Car- 
dinal's hat from the hand of Pope Leo XIII. 

Father! — for loftier titles cannot hide 

The tenderness of thy paternity 

From eyes that turn with filial gaze to thee — 
Sons of thy Faith, across the ocean wide, 
Led of thy light from paths unsanctified. 

Thine own begotten, though unseen are we. 

Thy loss, thy gain, we count our own to be : 
And now our hearts exulting in the tide 
Of favors shed upon thee from the hand 
Whose grace outgrows its giving, fondly glow 
With more than silent syllables express. 
O westward, as the sunshine, to our land 
Still let thy love, a light perpetual, flow, 
Thy children bowed in reverence to bless! 

The perusal of this initiative work of our 
great American Lyrist would by no means sug- 
gest to the reader a coming vocation of so rare 
a nature as the peculiar and exquisite culture of 
the quatrain, and with such success as to exalt 

[47] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

him to a special and unique place in literature. 
Only three short poems are to be found on its 
pages, the shortest of ten lines. This book did 
not command the attention it deserved, and is 
now, I believe, out of print. 



[48] 



CHAPTER XI 

"poems." "an octave to MARY." "lYRICS." 

"the rosary in verse" 

Father Tabb, however, soon began to awaken 
the public to the fact that a new star was mount- 
ing the poetic horizon. The first magazines 
of this country and England published his 
verses, which were widely copied, and the critics 
were generous in praise ; so that when in Decem- 
ber, 1894, his second volume "Poems," dedi- 
cated to Sidney Lanier, appeared, it was 
welcomed on all sides; and that it touched a 
chord in the hearts of the people was evidenced 
by the fact that in January, 1895, a second edi- 
tion was called for. A copy came to me later 
from a dear friend, long departed, who made 
in my favor a sacrifice; for It had been the gift 
of the Reverend Charles Ramm, whose exqui- 
site quatrain on the flyleaf was a worthy intro- 
duction to the poet-priest he so admired: 

The poet's prophet's eyes a form of beauty see — 

A glimpse of God, a vision fair — 
He chains it fast in measured links till we 

Of dimmer sight his rapture share. 

Prominent British critics placed the author 
of "Poems" in the front rank of American 
poets; and some pronounced him one of the 
greatest living poets in the English language. 

[49] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

"An Octave to Mary," somewhat of an edi- 
tion de luxe, in white or blue and gold, and 
bearing as frontispiece the Annunciation by E". 
Burne-Jones, had appeared during the preced- 
ing year. From the eight filial tributes to Mary, 
none of which exceeds in length three sestets, 
I select a bit of dialogue on the "Purification" : 

A PAIR OF TURTLE DOVES 

Where, Woman, is thine offering — 

The debt of law and love ? 
"M)^ Babe a tender nestling is. 

And I the mother-dove." 

The book of "Lyrics," inscribed "To the 
Memory of My Mother," appeared in 1897 — 
four editions between March and November. 
I was so fortunate as to receive my copy directly 
from the author, with his New Year greeting, 
and on the flyleaf the octet, "Ready." 

They might not need me 

Yet they might ; 
I'll let my heart be 

Just in sight. 
A smile so small as 

Mine might be 
Precisely their 

Necessity. 

Father Tabb had read a critical estimate of 
his book of "Poems" which I had written to a 
young relative, and this was the grateful out- 

[50] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

pouring of his heart for so slight a favor. 
Stranger that I was to him, I was quite over- 
powered. 

"Child Verse" was issued in 1899; ^^i^ ^^ 
1902 another volume was given to an eager 
public — "Later Lyrics," dedicated to his sister, 
to whom he was devotedly attached. The open- 
ing poem, haunting in its music, is a revelation 
of the poet's longings: 

TO A SONGSTER 

O little bird, I'd be 
A Poet like to thee, 
Singing my native song — 
Brief to the ear, but long 
To Love and Memory. 

"The Rosary in Verse," another tribute of 
love to Mary, is a chain of fifteen precious 
pearls of verse. The opening mystery, "The 
Annunciation," is told thus: 

Accustomed in the highest heights to be, 

The Angel bowed in awe, 
As if, amazed before Humility, 

A deeper heaven he saw. 

And the final mystery, "The Coronation of 
Mary," is portrayed with equally striking 
brevity : 

Thee, Mother-Queen of Heaven, He crowned, 

And not for love alone; 
For in thy bosom first He found 

The life-spring of His own. 

[51] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

, This little volume is dedicated "To the 
Right Reverend Alfred A. Curtis, D. D., with 
the love and veneration of his first son in 
Christ." It is an exquisite specimen of book- 
making by Small, Maynard & Co., Boston, 
1904, embellished with fifteen full-page deco- 
rative drawings and initial letters by Thomas 
B. Meteyard; the edition was hmited to three 
hundred and fifty copies. 



[52] 



CHAPTER XII 

MRS. MEYNELL'S selection OF VERSES. "qUIPS 
AND QUIDDITS." "LATER POEMS" 

In 1907 the title page of a new book read: 
"A Selection from the Verses of John B. Tabb, 
made by Alice Meynell." This selection, a 
worthy one in every respect, as the name of the 
poet and essayist who made it would attest, 
gave great pleasure to Father Tabb, who dedi- 
cated the book to Mrs. Meynell. His sight 
was now fast failing, and my presentation copy 
was followed by a brief and touching postal in 
a tremulous hand of the date of January 3, 

1908. "I send you, dear , 'The Living 

Age,' with a very kind notice from the London 
Times. This, with my greeting, is all I can do. 
Gratefully and faithfully yours, John B. Tabb." 

Mrs. Meynell had spent some months on the 
Cahfornia coast with friends in 1901-02, where 
she corresponded with Father Tabb, who some- 
times sent me her letters to read. He remarks to 
me in a letter dated October, 1901 : "She is 
perhaps the best Catholic English writer, and 
Ruskin, whose life she wrote, calls her a great 
critic. Her lecture, I am sure, is a great literary 
treat. . . . Hoping you may see her if 
she comes to Washington, or, still better, hear 
her, I am. Your friend in Christ, John B. Tabb." 

[S3l 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

He had made extraordinary efforts to procure 
for the famous poet and essayist a sufficient 
number of engagements to justify a trip to the 
East, and I, too, with friends, had entered with 
zest into the enterprise. To his great regret, 
it failed. 

Apart from Mrs. Meynell's fame as a writer, 
Francis Thompson had portrayed her in lines 
of such Dantean beauty in "Love in Dian's 
Lap" that it seemed to her friends she should 
have been the observed of all observers in our 
country. Personally, my admiration for her as 
a writer is extraordinary, but my affections have 
long been hers — apart, unknown — for the un- 
speakable kindnesses which she, in conjunction 
with her husband, showered upon the neglected 
poet: she deserved, indeed, to be raised to im- 
mortality by his pen, which honored her equally 
in her children in "Sister Songs" and other 
poems. 

In April, 191 2, Father Tabb writes: "I am 
sending herewith a letter from Mrs. Meynell, 
and the verses of mine which she kindly ap- 
proves. Accept them with the Easter greetings 
of Your friend in Christ, John B. Tabb." 
These three exquisite six-lined stanzas bore the 
title, "To Her First-Born." A postscript 
added: "Nothing from Mrs. Meynell since I 
wrote you last. On the 12th, I think, she sails." 

In the same year, 1907, "Quips and Quid- 
dits," an illustrated book of humorous verse, 

[54] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

came from the press. The edition of "Selec- 
tions" just mentioned had been bound in a color 
which seems to have appealed to Father Tabb's 
sense of humor, and one of these "Quips" reads 
as follows: 

ON THE COVER OF JOHN B. TABB's 
LATE LONDON VOLUME 

His eyes are dim: 

And so for him, 
They thought in London, 'twas enough 
To bind his book in blind-man's buff. 

The illustrations, which add to the humor of 
the volume, were designed, I conjecture, by the 
author's own pen. A doubtful point In his- 
torical records he amusingly discusses in 

QUEEN BESS 

Or praise or obloquy is hers 
As history has viewed her; 

To some a i der she appears. 
To others but a 2 dor. 

The poet plays with the instruments of his 
art in 

UNSTATIONARY STATIONERY 

The Wax waxed hotter and hotter 

Till the Seal took his seat on her back ; 

And the Pen wiped his foot on the Blotter, 
And laughed at them both from the Rack. 

Here is the penalty inflicted for a slip In 
orthography. 

[55] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

to mr. andrew lang, who spelled my name 
"tab" 

O why should Old Lang Sign 

A compliment to me 
(If it indeed is mine) 

And filch my final b? 
To him as to the Dane 

In his soliloquy, 
This question comes again, — 

"2 b or not 2 b?" 

"Later Poems" came to the world as a dying 
gift from the poet, dedicated 

"To M. A. C. 

to whom 

My Right Reverend Father in Christ 

the late 

Bishop Alfred A. Curtis, D. D., 

commended his son." 

It was a collection of poems that had hon- 
ored the columns of the Atlantic Monthly, 
Harper's Magazine and others during his later 
years. His bhndness prevented his preparation 
of the volume for the press. A letter dated 
March 2, 1909, and dictated to another hand, 

refers to the forthcoming poems : "Dear : 

Thank you for your letter, but not for the pre- 
mature embalming of your friend; after I am 
dead, folks may say what they please, but my 
poor living body does not fancy perfume. . . . 
Mrs. Meynell is preparing my last volume for 
publication, a copy of which you shall have 

[561 



THE PRIEST-POET 

when it appears. As to the sketch of my life, 
I'm fighting hard to baffle the project. 
Please accept my best blessing and give me your 
prayers. Ever yours faithfully, John B. Tabb." 
The beloved author did not live to see his 
"Later Poems" in print. He was summoned 
to his heavenly reward in November of the 
same year, and the volume came from the press 
(Kennerly, New York) only in 19 lo. Its hun- 
dred and more poems seemed to those who 
loved him and treasured his least words a little 
shower of pearls dropped on his way to Heaven. 
Deeply pathetic and touching are the poems — a 
decade of them — on his blindness, which breathe 
to us his last message of resignation and hope 
and love as he sought more than ever the eternal 
light that shines in the soul from the unseen 
world. 



[57] 



CHAPTER XIII 

ESTIMATE OF HIS POEMS. HIS OPTIMISTIC SPIRIT 

A tragic writer, Alcestides, boasted that 
whereas Euripides had composed only three 
verses in three days, he himself had written 
three hundred. "Thou sayest the truth," an- 
swered the dramatist, "but thine shall be read 
only three days, while mine shall last for three 
ages." To my mind, the same scale of propor- 
tion may be used in comparing the ephemeral 
fame of a score of prolix poets of our own day 
with Father Tabb's enshrinement in the hearts 
of a long-abiding posterity. A lover and ap- 
prenticed student of the Elizabethan writers, 
pre-eminently of the Shakespearean drama, 
which he taught with unparalleled enthusiasm, 
Father Tabb's poetic phrase is woven with the 
exquisite skill and variety of the genius of that 
age, whether he rises to the elevated truths that 
so captivated his noble intellect or expatiates in 
the most delicate regions of fancy. The rhythm 
is that of the musician whose ear is attuned to 
the perfection of melody. His language is in- 
deed music; the overflow of vowels and soft 
consonants, the artistic freedom of accent, and 
the subtle interplay of different metres give a 
fascination to the poet's verse-making only in- 
ferior to the spell cast upon us by his thought 
and imagery. 

[S8] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Unlike Francis Thompson, he did not seek 
in the Elizabethan treasury words, however 
beautiful, that had the stamp of antiquity; nor 
did he ever coin new words for his purpose, — 
and he might have done so and added a golden 
score to the modern poet's vocabulary, so prodi- 
gious was his inventive power and so sane the 
judgment and taste that ruled it. The truth is, 
Father Tabb loved simplicity — he sang first 
for God, and then for every soul that wished to 
hear, from the princes of the realms of intellect 
and fancy to the simple and unlearned, yea, to 
the child. 

The poet loves solitary places : 

to his capable ears 
Silence is music from the holy spheres: — 

and the charm and divine contentment that 
Father Tabb found in "loneliness" he reveals to 
us in the lyric 

IN SOLITUDE 

Like as a brook that all night long 
Sings, as at noon, a bubble-song 

To Sleep's unheeding ear, 
The Poet to himself must sing, 
When none but God is listening 

The lullaby to hear. 

In passing I would ask you to observe the 
perfect music of the versification, the tender 
voweling, the soft unobtrusive flow of the con- 

[59] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

sonants, the variable fall of the accent; in a few 
lines of iambic tetrameter and trimeter, we hear 
as well the pleasing ring of trochee, dactyl, am- 
phibrach and spondee; and this ease and mas- 
tery of change betray everywhere the *'maker 
and model of melodious verse." 

Father Tabb was a lover of silence, too, — 
the silence of the soul: and his poems on this 
theme are notable and suggestive. Here he 
questions 

SILENCE 

Why the warning finger-tip 
Pressed forever on thy lip? 
"To remind the pilgrim Sound 
That it treads on holy ground, 
In a breathing space to be 
Hushed for all eternity." 

This lyric of six lines touches the sublime as 
well in its Scriptural allusion as in its great final 
thought. It recalls a brief lyric of John Boyle 
O'Reilly, which begins: 

The Infinite ever is silent, 
Only the finite speaks. 

A masterly critic in the London "Times," 
quoted by "Littell's Living Age," remarks of 
the poem "To Silence" : "Grandeur cannot be 
achieved in six lines by grandiloquence. In the 
immensity of what it suggests, the vast silence 
out of which it wakes and into which it fades, 
that poem is undeniably grand." 

[60] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

A cheerful and optimistic spirit shines through 
all Father Tabb's verses ; not a trace of melan- 
choly Is to be found among them; his themes 
are sometimes sad, but soft and beautiful lights 
of hope, resignation, and kindred emotions 
make the sadness sweet; and you are led into 
visions of loveliness by the hand of Sorrow 
herself. I do not know a poem which Illustrates 
better what I have said than that tender lyric 
"Confided," which Is found In every American 
anthology. It Is the plaint of a mother who has 
just laid her little babe In God's Acre. 

Another lamb, O Lamb of God, behold. 

Within this quiet fold. 

Among Thy Father's sheep 

I lay to sleep! 

A heart that never for a night did rest 

Beyond its mother's breast. 

Lord, keep it close to Thee, 

Lest waking it should bleat and pine for me ! 

His cheerfulness has a special winning power: 
it has held a charm for me since the day I 
opened the first book of "Poems." How softly 
he smiles sorrow away in the "Fern Song" ! 

Dance to the beat of the rain, little Fern, 
And spread out your palms again. 

And say, "Tho' the sun 

Hath my vesture spun. 
He had labored, alas, in vain, 

But for the shade 

That the Cloud hath made, 

[6i] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

And the gift of the Dew and the Rain." 

Then laugh and upturn 

All your fronds, little Fern, 
And rejoice in the beat of the rain ! 

No melancholy there ! He would have us 
laugh and welcome the little trials that befall 
us — the Cloud and the Dew and the Rain, that 
come even into the sunny lives of youth, because 
they strengthen us and make us grow spiritually 
and intellectually. Here is what his happy 
nature thinks of 

LAUGHTER 

"Et ridebit in die novissimo" 
When wrought of Joy and Innocence 

'Tis unto God it goes, 
A fragrance of the olive whence 

His "oil of gladness" flows. 

In a letter dated February, 1902, he writes: 
"As to the blues, 1 am upside down — the worst 
weather putting me in the best spirits. 'The 
Smart Set' has taken the following quatrain : 

BY CONTRARIES 

'Tis strange, but ominously true. 
When we are bright the skies are blue ; 
But, let them change their livery. 
And in a moment blue are we. 

This, of course, only true of well-constructed 
people — not cranks, such as I." 



[62] 



CHAPTER XIV 

HIS LOVE OF NATURE. FLOWER POEMS 

Father Tabb has the poet's passionate love 
of nature, but subhmated; his sense of beauty 
was a part of his religion; and to such a spirit 
every object of creation becomes a ladder of 
light by which it mounts to the Maker of all 
things. Browning says: 

God is the Perfect Poet, 
Who in creation acts His own conceptions; 

and to His hand Father Tabb clung like a little 
child, watching Him breathlessly, joyously, 
in the minutest details of creation — of life, 
motion, color, as expressed in the flower, the 
bird, the insect, in the elements, in the starry 
universe, in the complex workings of the Divine 
Spirit in the temple of human personality. 

From the sacred Presence of the Tabernacle, 
where, like his saintly model. Bishop Curtis, he 
spent hours of fervent adoration, he would 
pass to his sanctuary of the woods, and there 
wait, assured of poetic inspiration. For there 
he swung anew the worship-cloud of incense in 
the golden censer of exquisite verse to the ever- 
present Creator. 

Indeed, who can surpass his own conception 
of the divine art he so loved and honored? 
Read it: 

[63] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

POETRY 
A gleam of Heaven; the passion of a star 

Held captive in the clasp of harmony; 
A silence, shell-like breathing from afar 

The rapture of the deep — eternity. 

The soul that has found its mystical union 
with the Maker is there, so it seems to me, 

I have wondered if the poet saw the acorns 
fall as he sat that day in the woods with pen 
in hand and mused: we are the richer for his 
musings in 

COMPENSATION 
How many an acorn falls to die 

For one that makes a tree! 
How many a heart must pass me by 

For one that cleaves to me! 

How many a suppliant wave of sound 

Must still unheeded roll, 
For one low utterance that found 

An echo in my soul! 

How numerous and how varied in beauty and 
the suggested moral lesson are the flower 
poems! In one of his roamings through the 
woods he brought home to the college a flower, 
and to that we owe 

MY CAPTIVE 
I brought a blossom home with me 

Beneath my roof to stay; 
But timorous and frail was she 

And died before the day: 
She missed the measureless expanse 
Of heaven, and heaven her countenance. 

[64] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

There is a sublimity of suggestion in the last 
two lines that often startles us in Father Tabb's 
singing, a hint of divine analogies that must 
give us pause. 

"Wood Grain" is an exquisite lyric in dactylic 
metre: a bit of graphic picture-work intended, 
no doubt, to symbolize the hidden workings of 
God's grace in lives. 

This is the way that the sap-river ran 
From the root to the top of the tree — 
Silent and dark, 
Under the bark, 
Working a wonderful plan 
That the leaves never know, 
And the branches that grow 
On the brink of the tide never see. 

Here is a little pearl of delicate sweetness 
and daintiness: 

A SLEEPING-PLACE 

When into the Rose 

A ladybird goes 
And o'er her couch the petals close, 

Was ever bed 

So canopied 
For lids in maiden slumber wed ? 

Now in soft trochaics and glowing rhetoric 
he is chatting familiarly with "The Yellow 
Crocus." 

Were you, little Monarch, crowned 

Under ground? 
Or did the Daylight make you king 

Of the Spring? 

[65] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Ere your blossom-retinue 

Come to you, 
I, before your Majesty, 

Bow the knee. 

Did you ever feel like this when you saw the 
first Crocus? I feel so every March. 

And can you find a more fascinating little 
bit of drama than the poet presents in 

THE TAX-GATHERER 

"And pray, who are you?" 
Said the Violet blue 
To the Bee, with surprise 
At his wonderful size. 
In her eye-glass of dew. 

"I, madam," quoth he, 
"Am a publican Bee, 
Collecting the tax 
On honey and wax. 
Have you nothing for me?" 

The Violet claims many tender tributes — 
"To a Wood Violet," "Brotherhood," "The 
Violet Speaks," "One April Morn," and others. 



[66] 



CHAPTER XV 

FLORAL LYRICS CONTINUED 

Spring never came forth under the veil of 
Allegory in more exquisite and touching beauty 
than she appears to us in 

THE TRYST OF SPRING 

Stern Winter sought the hand of Spring, 
And, tempered to her milder mood, 
Died leafless on the budding breast 
He fondly wooed. 

She wept for him her April tears. 
But, from the shadows wandering soon, 
Dreamed of a warmer love to come 
With lordly June. 

He scatters roses at her feet. 
And sunshine o'er her queenly brow, 
And through the listening silence breathes 
A bridal vow. 

She answers not; but, like a mist 
O'erbrimmed and tremulous with light, 
In sudden tears she vanishes 
Before his sight. 

Does not the last stanza appeal to you with 
a poignant human touch? 

Two far apart — beauty in sublimity and 
beauty in littleness — are made lovable person- 

[67] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

alities in Dawn and the Blossom, and brought 
into dramatic contact in "Come True." Amid 
the train of conceptions that their tender col- 
loquy evokes, the final one is dominant — the 
sweetly living and ever-ruling thought of Father 
Tabb — of the transitoriness of all earthly 
glories, the passing away of mortal hopes and 
loves. 

"Good morrow!" breathed the Blossom. 

"Good morrow!" flushed the Dawn. 
"Where were you, dear, before the light? 
For I was dreaming all the night 

That we should meet anon, 
To drink a dewdrop here today. 
And then together pass away." 

The apostrophe "To a Rose," beginning 

Thou hast not toiled, sweet Rose, 
Yet needest rest, 

summons up its counterpart, Herrick's lovely 
"Daffodils," so persistent a favorite of mine, 
that it has been painted on Memory's canvas by 
each succeeding band of pupils. I deem that both 
poets stood in contemplation before the flowers 
of their love, when of a sudden each calyx be- 
came a well-spring of inspiration; and they 
turned from the spot in a brief space their 
dream of beauty and tears — of "Life's mys- 
tery" — transferred to their tablets for an en- 
tranced posterity. 

[68] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

It is hard to restrain the temptation to cull 
more of the poet's dainty Flora, for it is a royal 
garden in which Father Tabb's Muse disports, 
and she has a loving glance and a lyric for all 
these rainbow children of the sun, yea, even for 
the "Wild Flowers" that strew the woods be- 
yond her crystal gate. The common "Clover" 
of our fields, mounting Nature's pulpit, becomes 
the poet's teacher. Brimming with simplicity 
and reverence, a revelation of beauty, and 
breathing subtle intimations of the Trinity and 
Unity of God, the most majestic dogma of our 
faith, this poem recalls St. Patrick standing be- 
fore the King of Tara and conveying to him 
through the little three-leaved shamrock the 
mysterious lesson of Christianity. 

CLOVER 

Little Masters, hat in hand, 
Let me in your presence stand. 
Till your silence solve for me 
This your threefold mystery. 

Tell me — for I long to know — 
How, in darkness there below. 
Was your fairy fabric spun. 
Spread and fashioned, three in one. 

Did your gossips, gold and blue. 
Sky and Sunshine, choose for you, 
Ere your triple forms were seen, 
Suited liveries of green ? 

[69] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Can ye — if ye dwelt indeed 
Captives of a prison seed — 
Like the Genie, once again 
Get you back into the grain ? 

Little Masters, may I stand 
In your presence, hat in hand. 
Waiting till you solve for me 
This your threefold mystery? 



[70] 



CHAPTER XVI 

BIRD LYRICS 

In a group of enchanting bird lyrics — more 
than thirty of them — the little minstrels of the 
air most dear to us are all immortalized. Now 
Father Tabb is watching a pair of birds build- 
ing a nest — a most fascinating bit of architec- 
ture, of which act I think I am an unimpeach- 
able witness, having been chief assistant to the 
thrush and wren on many occasions. He 
daintily pictures the planning of the airy struc- 
ture, the laying of the eggs, the hatching of the 
fledgelings, and the flight. Now it is a lark high 
in the air, athrob with life and song — anon it is 
a dead thrush that awakens his sympathy. The 
bluebird, the robin, the lovely killdee, "a rhap- 
sody of Hght," — and how many more! — all 
chant their madrigals for him and he in turn 
sings their praises in dewy poesy. There he is 
bending over a "Humming-Bird" which his 
poet-brush paints for us in this fashion : 

A flash of harmless lightning, 

A mist of rainbow dyes, 
The burnished sunbeams brightening, 

From flower to flower he flies: 

While wakes the nodding blossom, 

But just too late to see 
What lip hath touched her bosom 

And drained her nectary. 

[71] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

The mocking-bird, I think, is his favorite, 
after the killdee. "O heart that cannot sleep 
for song!" — he so addresses that midnight 
warbler, delirious with rapture, in one poem; 
and in another, "A Phonograph," he sums up 
the bird's whole score of musical robberies in a 
delicious quatrain : 

Hark! what his fellow warblers heard 

And uttered in the light, 
Their phonograph, the mocking-bird, 

Repeats to them at night. 

The story is told by many lyrists how the 
dear robin's breast became red, but by none, I 
conceive, so briefly and sweetly as by Father 
Tabb. Judge for yourselves : 

When Christ was taken from the rood, 

One thorn upon the ground, 
Still moistened with the Precious Blood, 

An early Robin found 
And wove it crosswise in his nest. 
Where, lo, it reddened all his breast! 

The poet conjures "Two Sparrows" from 
their far-away home in the Scriptural land to 
renew for us the Master's lesson: 

To creatures upon earth, 
Our price one farthing worth : 
To everlasting Love 

All price above. 

[72] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

And in the same vein of Scriptural rever- 
ence is 

HOLY GROUND 

Pause where apart the fallen sparrow lies, 

And lightly tread; 
For there the pity of a Father's eyes 

Enshrines the dead. 

Of this quatrain a London critic says with 
truth: "In that thought lies the secret of the 
unity for which Father Tabb seeks in living and 
dead, man and flower, great and small." 

"The Dead Thrush" is all melody. A bird- 
lover cannot see the beautiful speckle-breast 
that charmed so many summer hours lying 
stark without a pang akin to that for human 
loss: I know one, at least, who has suffered this 
pang many times. But Father Tabb's elegy is 
full of hope. Here is his first stanza : 

Love of nest and mate and young 
Woke the music of his tongue, 
While upon the fledgeling's brain 
Soft it fell as scattered grain, 
There to blossom tone for tone 
Into echoes of his own. 

I cannot part with these lovely warblers of 
the "sylvan solitudes" without listening awhile 
with the poet to the strains of 

[73] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

THE WOOD ROBIN 

The wooing air is jubilant with song; 

And blossoms swell 
As leaps thy liquid melody along 

The dusky dell, 
Where Silence, late supreme, foregoes her wonted spell. 



Teach me, thou warbling eremite, to sing 

Thy rhapsody; 
Nor borne on vain ambition's vaunting wing. 

But led of thee, 
To rise from earthly dreams to hymn eternity. 



[74] 



CHAPTER XVII 

BABYHOOD AND YOUTH IN POESY 

Love was the principle of Father Tabb's 
life — primarily intense love of God, and then 
its natural outcome, love of the neighbor — that 
ardent love of souls that distinguishes the priest, 
yes, but moreover a cordial, tender, expansive, 
Christlike love which finds its object in the little 
babe on its mother's breast, in the gentle, pure 
maiden, in the rollicking boy, in every type of 
noble manhood or womanhood; his deep affec- 
tions flow out to the stranger, to the erring, to 
the wanderer, to call them back by a thousand 
winning ways. The last two stanzas of "Visible 
Sound" proclaim this all-radiating and all-con- 
verging principle of life and beauty. 

Yea, Love, of sweet Nature the Lord, 
Hath fashioned each manifold chord 
To utter His visible Word, 

Whose work, wheresoever begun, 
Like the rays floating back to the Sun, 
In the soul of all beauty is one. 

Francis Thompson wrote to his infant god- 
child, Francis Meynell — anticipating the arrival 
of this "heir of his song" in the Blessed Land 
long after his own entrance there — "Look for 
me in the nurseries of Heaven!" And judg- 

[751 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

ing from the alluring loveliness with which 
Babyhood sits throned in Father Tabb's poetic 
bower, crowned and circled by the "Rosebud" 
vines of his delicate fancy and tender affection, 
I am inclined to believe that the poet-priest has 
found a part of his beatitude in those "divine 
nurseries." Surely the "Babe Niva" must have 
welcomed him there : 

Niva, Child of Innocence, 

Dust to dust we go : 
Thou, when Winter wooed thee hence, 

Wentest snow to snow. 

And the Babe whom he apostrophized in 
dying, too, smiled a heavenly greeting: 

O Bubble, break! All heaven thou hast 

Unsullied in thy heart! 
Ere Time its shadow on thee cast 

Love calls thee to depart. 

But let us descend the crystal ladder to earth 
again, and, entering on tiptoe into a dainty 
nursery of Time, see with the poet's eyes 

BABY 

Baby in her slumber smiling, 

Doth a captive take: 
Whispers Love, "From dreams beguiling 

May she never wake!" 

[76] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

When the lids, like mist retreating, 

Flee the azure deep, 
Wakes a newborn Joy, repeating, 

"May she never sleep!" 

And now behold the innocent Babe turned 
suddenly and bewitchingly into 

AN IDOLATER 
The Baby has no skies 
But Mother's eyes; 
Nor any God above 
But Mother's love. 
His Angel sees the Father''s face, 
But he the Mother's full of grace; 
And yet the Heavenly Kingdom is 
Of such as this. 

Hush! Listen to the lovely "Cradle-Song," 
a tribute to mother-love which, I doubt not, for 
its exquisite pathos and tender reminiscence, has 
drawn tears from many a mother's eyes: 

Sing it. Mother! sing it low: 

Deem it not an idle lay. 
In the heart 't will ebb and flow 

All the life-long way. 

Sing it, Mother, Love is strong! 

When the tears of manhood fall. 
Echoes of thy cradle-song 

Shall its peace recall. 

Sing it. Mother ! when his ear 
Catcheth first the Voice Divine, 

Dying, he may smile to hear 
What he deemeth thine. 

[771 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

How playfully and carefully the poet-uncle 
has portrayed "Baby's Dimples" ! 

Love goes playing hide-and-seek 
Mid the roses on her cheek, 
With a little imp of Laughter, 
Who, the while he follows after. 
Leaves the footprints that we trace 
All about the Kissing-place. 

And here, more attractive in its dainty pic- 
turesqueness than any that ever came from a 
king's garden, is 

A BUNCH OF ROSES 

The rosy mouth and rosy toe 

Of little baby brother. 
Until about a month ago 

Had never met each other; 
But nowadays the neighbors sweet, 

In every sort of weather, 
Half way with rosy fingers meet, 

To kiss and play together. 

Yet "Chanticleer," 

A crowing, cuddling little Babe was he, 

would perhaps gain the prize over them all for 
winning charm and for pathos — that sudden 
pull at the heartstrings that leaves an ache long 
after. 

In a graphic Allegory of six stanzas, "The 
New-Year Babe," Father Tabb tells us how 

[78] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Two together, Babe and Year, 

At the midnight chime. 
Through the darkness drifted here 
To the coast of Time. 

After a journey to "the land of May" and on 
"through the Vale of Autumn to the Mount of 
Snow," 

Then together Babe and Year 

Slept : but ere the dawn, 
Vanishing, I know not where. 

Brother Year was gone! 

Father Tabb has honored Maidenhood by 
many pure and lovely conceptions. My readers 
will pardon me if I choose two that touch upon 
the shadow of life, poems that leave a feeling 
of exquisite sadness that the heart often loves 
better than mirth. The first is entitled 

MAIDEN BLOOM 

Where the youthful rivals meet — 

Reddest Rose and whitest Snow — 
From a trysting-place so sweet. 

Which will soonest go? 
"Hence with life alone I stray," 

Blushed the flower of balmy breath. 
"Mine," the snow-wreath sighed, "to stay 

Steadfast e'en in death." 

The second poem is a favorite, and was 
copied very widely when it first appeared in one 
of the leading magazines of the country. "The 

[79l 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

White Jessamine" sings its own idyl of love for 
the little maiden who had planted it and lov- 
ingly watched its climbing tendrils, but ere it 
had throbbed into bloom suddenly fell ill. The 
Jessamine at last in the stillness of night reaches 
her window, where, it tells us, 

Her gende whisper thrilled me 
Ere I gazed upon her face. 

I waited, darkling, till the dawn 
Should touch me into bloom, 

While all my being panted 
To outpour its first perfume ; 

When, lo ! a paler flower than mine 
Had blossomed in the gloom ! 

Was ever Death symbolized with such deli- 
cacy — such soft and touching picturesqueness of 
suggestion? 

There is a charm natural and sweet combined 
with innocent restfulness in the dainty question 
and answer Allegory, "The Playmates." 

Who are thy playmates, boy? 
"My favorite is Joy, 
Who brings with him his sister. Peace, to stay 

The livelong day. 
I love them both; but he 

Is most to me." 

And where thy playmates now, 
O man of sober brow? 
"Alas! dear Joy, the merriest, is dead. 
But I have wed 
Peace; and our babe, a boy, 
New-born, is Joy." 

[80] 



CHAPTER XVIII 

FATHER TABB's FRIENDSHIP WITH SIDNEY 
LANIER 

The memories of many noble and tender 
friendships are scattered through the pages of 
Father Tabb's poems, but one stands luminous : 
a veritable pillar of light to the poet, it would 
seem, was Sidney Lanier — of whom we made 
an earlier mention. Besides his poems, Mr. 
Lanier wrote novels, historical studies, essays, 
and a valuable work on the relations between 
music and poetry called "The Science of Eng- 
Hsh Verse." Stedman, the great American poet 
and critic, wrote: "When Sidney Lanier died 
(in 1881), not only the South that bore him, 
but the whole country and our English rhythm 
underwent the loss of a rare being." On the 
dedication page of Father Tabb's "Poems" his 
name is set in immortal lines : 

AVE: SIDNEY LANIER 

Ere Time's horizon-line was set, 
Somewhere in space our spirits met, 
Then o'er the starry parapet 

Came wandering here. 
And now that thou art gone again 
Beyond the verge, I haste amain 
(Lost echo of a loftier strain) 

To greet thee .there. 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

In "Love's Hybla" and many other lyrics the 
poet sends his minor strain up to his departed 
friend reigning in immortality. Here is one of 
these deep heart poems: 

TO SIDNEY LANIER 

The dewdrop holds the heaven above 

Wherein a lark unseen 
Outpours a rhapsody of love 

That fills the space between. 

My heart a dev^^drop is, and thou 

Dawn-spirit, far away 
Fillest the void between us now 

With an immortal lay. 

Their poetic styles are in remarkable con- 
trast. Rich, magnificent, diffuse, Lanier rolls 
out his verses in great waves of song, and, 
while they are pervaded with a highly sensuous 
beauty and overflowing with human sympathies, 
here and there you encounter lofty conceptions 
of the greatness of God which bring you to your 
knees in worship and make manifest the secret 
of the bond that so welded Father Tabb's soul 
to his. But Father Tabb moves and breathes 
in the heavenly atmosphere — he would have 
everything in nature, in art, in life, bring us into 
closer relations with the Creator, with the Re- 
deemer, with Heaven; he would sow a seed in 
our heart of faith heroic, of hope unfading, of 
love unutterable. 

[82] 



, THE PRIEST-POET 

It will not be amiss to give a specimen of 
.Sidney Lanier's verse. Of all his poems, I 
yielded most spontaneously to the fascinations 
of "The Marshes of Glynn," a poem of one 
hundred and five lines, which first appeared 
anonymously and attracted attention at once by 
its exquisite word-painting, its rich imagery, and 
its musical quality. One must read the whole 
poem in a quiet mood to appreciate its beauty. 

THE MARSHES OF GLYNN 

O braided dusks of the oak and woven shades of the 

vine, 
While the riotous noonday sun of the June day long 

did shine, 
Ye held me fast in your heart and I held you fast in 

mine; 
But now when the noon is no more, and riot is rest, 
And the sun is a-wait at the ponderous gate of the 

West, 
And the slant yellow beam down the wood-aisle doth 

seem 
Like a lane into Heaven that leads from a dream — 



Bending your beauty aside, with a step I stand 
On the firm-packed sand. 
Free 
By a world of marsh that borders a world of sea. 



Ye marshes, how candid and simple and nothing-with- 
holding and free 

Ye publish yourselves to the sky and offer yourselves 
to the sea! 

[83] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Tolerant plains, that suffer the sea and the rains and 

the sun, 
Ye spread and span like the catholic man who hath 

mightily won 
God out of knowledge and good out of infinite pain. 
And sight out of blindness and purity out of a stain. 

As the marsh-hen secretly builds on the watery sod, 
Behold I will build me a nest on the greatness of God ! 
I will fly in the greatness of God as the marsh-hen flies 
In the freedom that fills all the space 'twixt the marsh 

and the skies: 
By so many roots as the marsh-grass sends in the sod 
I will heartily lay me a-hold on the greatness of God: 
Oh, like to the greatness of God is the greatness within 
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of 

Glynn. 

Father Tabb's appreciation of Sidney Lanier's 
poems is unique — before him he "hides his 
diminished head," calls himself, as you have 
read, "Lost echo of a loftier strain." One 
eminent English critic remarks, however: "It 
is Interesting to contrast the long, voluminous, 
rushing flow of Lanier . . . with the 
minute, delicately carved work of his country- 
man. Which Is the greater poet, let those who 
like giving marks decide; but Father Tabb, 
working within the limits which the nature of 
his art Inevitably determined, piping, so to 
speak, upon his flute, can do things which 
Lanier's great four-manual organ could never 
accomplish." 

I was surprised and pleased some months 
ago by a tender little note from Mrs. Sidney 

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THE PRIEST-POET 

Lanier, who had heard of my forthcoming 
sketch of Father Tabb. The poet-priest re- 
mained devoted to her in the bonds of sym- 
pathy and holy friendship until his death. Her 
deep sensitive nature never recovered, I think, 
the shock of her gifted husband's death; and 
Father Tabb used to deplore her failing health 
to his friends. Here is her missive : 

"To the lover of Sidney Lanier's poems, 
whose kind greeting has come to me by Father 
Hasenfus, I would return the sympathy and 
thanks of her friend-in-will and her friend-in- 
Christ. 

"Mary Day Lanier. 
"September 13th, 19 14, 

Lanier Camp, Eliot, Maine." 

Father Tabb was present at the Lanier 
Memorial Meeting in Johns Hopkins Univer- 
sity, Baltimore, and paid the eloquent tribute of 
lifelong admiration and love to Sidney Lanier's 
genius. From the far-away year of his prison 
life, his memory had faithfully retained one 
cherished theme of Lanier's Flute ; this he gave 
to Mr. E. E. Trumbull, who arranged and har- 
monized it under the title: "A Melody from 
Sidney Lanier's Flute." Father Tabb popu- 
larized the song by some accompanying lines. 



[8s] 



CHAPTER XIX 

HIS FRIENDSHIP WITH BISHOP CURTIS 
UNIVERSAL BROTHERHOOD 

Knowing the friendship, of a celestial order, 
that bound him to Bishop Curtis from his 
youthful years, it cannot be doubted that a num- 
ber of the poems owe their inspiration to the 
Bishop, while others are tenderly reminiscent 
of his "angel visits." The saintly prelate's 
chief and recognized virture was his profound 
humility; and the disciple, I suspect, was "un- 
der orders" not to set his Master's name upon 
his immortal pages. It was a marvel that he 
was permitted to dedicate to him the beautiful 
"Rosary in Verse." Among the poems to 
which my belief on this point clings is 

WESTWARD 
And dost thou lead him hence with thee, 

O setting sun, 
And leave the shadows all to me 

When tv is gone? 
Ah, if my gnef his guerdon be, 

My dark his light, 
I count each loss felicity, 

And bless the night. 

"Photographed" and "O'erspent" equally 
point to Bishop Curtis as their source of being, 
as well as the deep and sincere heart-cry, 

[86] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

ALTER EGO 
Thou art to me as is the sea 

Unto the shell ; 
A life whereof I breathe, a love 

Wherein I dwell. 

And no one can doubt that his friend in dying 
inspired "Finis," one of the last poignant 
strains of the lyrist's heart. It is touched with 
indescribable pathos because of the cruel suf- 
ferings of his holy director during the illness 
preceding his death in 1908, and Father Tabb's 
own blindness and fast-failing health. 

FINIS 
O to be with thee sinking to thy rest, 

Thy journey done ; 
The world thou leavest blessing thee and blest, 

O setting sun! 
The clouds, that ne'er the morning joys forget, 

Again aglow. 
And leaf and flower with tears of twilight wet 

To see thee go. 

There is a feature of universal brotherhood 
that cannot fail to impress one in reading Father 
Tabb. It is the echo of our Saviour's words : 
"Love one another as / have loved you." My 
choice shall fall upon three out of many that 
are steeped in the fragrance of this doctrine : 

god's likeness 
Not in my own, but in my neighbor's face, 

Must I Thine image trace; 
Nor he in his, but in the light of mine, 

Behold Thy Face Divine. 

[87] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

TO THE CHRIST 

Thou hast on earth a Trinity, — 
Thyself, my fellow-man and me; 
When one with him, then one with thee ; 
Nor, save together. Thine are we. 

CHARITY 

If but the world would give to Love 
The crumbs that from its table fall, 
'T were bounty large enough for all 
The famishing to feed thereof. 

And Love, that still the laurel wins 
Of Sacrifice, would lovelier grow, 
And round the world a mantle throw 
To hide its multitude of sins. 

Perhaps in contrast to these I might quote a 
rather original and humorous conception pecu- 
liar to Father Tabb ; it is entitled 

THE STRANGER 

He entered ; but the mask he wore 

Concealed his face from me. 
Still, something I had seen before 

He brought to memory. 

Who art thou? What thy rank, thy name? 

I questioned with surprise; 
"Thyself " the laughing answer came, 

"As seen of others' eyes." 

And the littleness of "Prejudice," that vice 
of purblind souls, that destroyer of a fellow- 
creature's influence, that stumbling-block to 

[88] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

many good and noble works, is unfolded in four 
lines of metaphor: 

A leaf may hide the largest star 

From Love's uplifted eye; 
A mote of prejudice out-bar 

A world of charity. 

The priest-poet's large-hearted sympathies 
stretched from "The Hermit," who. 

High on the mountain-top, 

. spelt 
The name of the Omnipotent, and knelt 
In lowly reverence of adoring love, 

across the great universe of human struggle 
and fulfillment and tragic failure even to the 
despairing outcast in "Quo Vadis?" 

The sedge was sere ; the water still, 
As waiting for the wintry chill ; 
When, shadow-like along the hill, 
She moved alone. 

A plunge, a ripple, and a sigh 
Of waters; — fleeting soul, reply. 
Was it for death of Love to die. 
Or to atone? 

You whose hearts are divided from kindred 
hearts, who look back upon years of separation, 
whereas Love should have been playing chords 
of harmony and union all through your sad- 
dened lives, read 

[89] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

LIFE 

The Power that lifts the leaf above 

And sends the root below, 
Sustains the heart in brother-love 

And makes it heavenward grow. 

In "The Bridge" the poet symbolizes and 
prays for the brotherhood of the nations. The 
last stanza of the five is an appeal. 

O that, all strife above, 
Strong in the strength thereof, 

Man evermore 
Built, with a broader span, 
Love for his fellow-man 

From shore to shore! 



[90] 



CHAPTER XX 

FEASTS OF THE CHURCH. CHRISTMAS POEMS 

The Feasts of the Church hold their conse- 
crated rites in the poet-priest's sanctuary of 
Poesy. There is a little galaxy of Christmas 
poems of wondrous diversity. I have already 
quoted one that concentrates a whole mission 
sermon in its six starry lines, — "A Little Boy 
of Heavenly Birth." Among many others are 
"The Lamb-Child," "A Christmas Cradle," 
"The Angel's Christmas Quest," and the favor- 
ite allegory of the Christmas dream, so pictorial, 
so overflowing with scriptural suggestion, and 
so redolent of deep peace, — 

MISTLETOE 

To the cradle-bough of a naked tree, 

Benumbed with ice and snow, 
A Christmas dream brought suddenly 

A birth of mistletoe. 

The shepherd stars from their fleecy cloud 
Strode out on the night to see; 

The Herod north-wind blustered loud 
To rend it from the tree. 

But the old year took it for a sign, 

And blessed it in his heart: 
"With prophecy of peace divine, 

Let now my soul depart." 

[91 1 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

The second chapter of St. Luke's Gospel be- 
comes dearer than ever when you have mastered 
that poem and carry it In your heart. May I 
analyze it a little? 

The poet has chosen the simplest form of 
verse, as befits the great theme. The rhythm 
is music: the sound is perfectly adapted to sense 
in the lines. In the second stanza the spondees 
add to the majesty of the first picture, and to the 
strength of the last. 

From the opening phrase the Divine Infant 
is the life of the poem. "To the cradle-bough" 
is a lovely invention, suggestive of birds' nests 
rocking in the summer breezes ; but then you are 
confronted with 

a naked tree 
Benumbed with ice and snow, 

an emblem of the wintry cave of Bethlehem, 
where a manger received the trembling frame 
of the Babe new-born ; typified, too, in the figure, 
is the then state of the wide, hopeless, cold- 
hearted world. The Dream-Feast and the 
Birth seem like fairy-land consecrated. 

How finely is the Allegory drawn out in the 
next stanza ! The shepherds "keeping the night 
watches over their flocks" become shepherd 
stars, the clouds their lambs; and borne at once 
to the starry heavens, are we not subtly con- 
scious of the angelic presences, even the har- 
monies of their Gloria? "Strode out in the 

[92] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

night to see" is a line of power — a Thompsonian 
line; and the blustering "northwind" is a mir- 
rored type of the cruel Herod, "who sought 
the Child to destroy Him," and, foiled by the 
Kings, slew a multitude of "Innocents," secure 
that His Blood would swell the sacrificial tor- 
rent. 

But what a deep significance in "the old 
year" ! The aged and holy Simeon rises before 
us, the type of the ancient dispensation, who 
"entered the temple by the Spirit" just as Mary 
and Joseph bore the Babe-Victim within its 
hallowed precincts to present Him to His Eter- 
nal Father. Taking the Child in his arms, the 
aged saint at once knew his God, the Expecta- 
tion of Israel, and, with supreme happiness, 
chanted his "Nunc dimittis," — "Now dost Thou 
dismiss Thy servant, O Lord, in peace, because 
my eyes have seen Thy Salvation." 

The first soft slumbers of the new-born 
Infant are commemorated in twelve hnes of 
exquisite imagery — the last three divinely beau- 
tiful, with the glow of more than seraphic love. 

AT THE MANGER 

When first her Christmas watch to keep, 
Came down the silent angel, Sleep, 

With snowy sandals shod, 
Beholding what His Mother's hands 
Had wrought, with softer swaddling-bands 

She swathed the Son of God. 

[93] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Then, skilled in mysteries of night, 
With tender visions of delight 

She wreathed His resting place, 
Till, wakened by a warmer glow 
Than Heaven itself had yet to show. 

He saw His Mother's face. 

Here we listen to divine words from the very 
lips of "The Babe to the Gift-Bearer." 

I cannot hold within My hands 

Thy gift, but here My Mother stands 

To take it as My own. 
It is through her I come to thee. 
And now our go-between is she 

Till I am older grown. 

There is a haunting music from many 
Epiphany strains, with their high faith rising 
almost to vision; let us listen to one that is inter- 
woven with an ancient classical theme, in 

THE ARGONAUTS 

To Bethlehem, to Bethlehem, 

The Magi move, and we with them. 

Along the selfsame road; 
Still following the Star of Peace, 
To find at last the Golden Fleece — 

The Spotless Lamb of God. 



[94] 



CHAPTER XXI 

PASSION-FLOWERS AND EASTER LILIES 

Father Tabb has planted in his garden of 
sacred verse a score of beautiful Passion-Flow- 
ers, which bear the heart to Calvary and Geth- 
semane. 

The triple stanzas of "The Vigil of Good 
Friday" might be called a perfect elegy of St. 
Peter's denial of Christ — "I know Him not" — 
with its beautiful climax of repentance, 



O Christ! its perjury 
Love weeps for Thee! 



Mary the Immaculate and Mary the penitent 
are pictured to us together during the Three 
Hours' Agony of the Saviour 

ON CALVARY 

In the shadow of the Rood 
Love and Shame together stood ; 
Love, that bade Him bear the blame 
Of her fallen sister, Shame; 
Shame, that by the pangs thereof 
Bade Him break His Heart for Love. 

Father Tabb's devotion to the Cross, the 
chief consolation In all life's trials, is manifest 
in many poems, touchingly so in his lines to the 
Crucifix hanging in his room, and touched with 
the early sun-rays. 

[95] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Day after day the spear of morning bright 
Pierces again the ever-wounded side, 

Pointing at once the birthspring of the light 
And where for Love the Light Eternal died. 

The last day of Holy Week was a fount of 
inspiration to the poet. "Holy Saturday" is 
an apostrophe to "Earth who daily kissed His 
feet"; in it Love and Death enact a drama, and 
every line of the poem is a study. Of excep- 
tional beauty and pathos is 

EASTER EVE 
Lo, now His deadliest foes prevail! 
And where His bleeding footsteps fail, 
Like wolves upon a victim's trail. 
They gloat, in purple mockery, "Hail!" 

O cloud! O regal vesture torn! 
O shadow on the shoulders borne ! 
O diadem ! — one starry thorn 
Shall blossom into Easter morn! 

As you descend the slope of the Mountain of 
Redemption, where the Passlon-Flowers bloom, 
lo ! you come upon the Divine Gardener sur- 
rounded by His spotless "Easter Lilies." 
"Easter Morning" welcomes His presence; 
"Rabboni" touchingly portrays His apparition 
to Magdalen; and the witnesses to His Resur- 
rection are the 

EASTER FLOWERS 
We are His witnesses; out of the dim 
Dank region of Death we have risen with Him. 
Back from our sepulchre rolleth the stone, 
And Spring, the bright Angel, sits smiling thereon. 

[96] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

We are His witnesses. See, where we lay 
The snow that late bound us is folded away ; 
And April, fair Magdalen, weeping anon. 
Stands flooded with light of the new-risen Sun! 

Magdalen has captivated our poet's heart 
with as sure dominion as she did the hearts of 
Robert Southwell, Richard Crashaw and other 
devout lyrists. Her name, her love, her tears, 
her spikenard, lead the thought or adorn a 
figure in half a score of his opals of verse. 
"Rabboni" is not the least beautiful of these 
tributes of love. 

"I bring Thee balm, and lo, Thou art not here! 

Twice have I poured mine ointment on Thy brow. 
And washed Thy feet with tears. Disdain'st Thou 
now 

The spikenard and the myrrh ? 

"Has Death, alas, betrayed Thee with a kiss 

That seals Thee from the memory of mine?" 
"Mary!" It is the self-same Voice Divine. 
Rabboni!" — only this. 



[97] 



CHAPTER XXII 

MARY IN HIS VERSE. DOGMAS 

There is a heavenly attraction for the poet in 
Mary, the Virgin Mother of God, the most 
glorious type of womanhood, the lily of purity, 
the Spouse all fair and without spot, the Woman 
clothed with the sun of divine glory and love. 
Father Tabb's devotion to this perfect ideal of 
human holiness can scarcely be conceived ex- 
cept by one who is profoundly imbued with a 
like sentiment of tender filial piety. 

Is not this piety set like a hidden jewel in the 
lines which recall the adoption of our race by 
Mary on Calvary? 

SON OF MARY 

She the Mother was of One — 
Christ, her Saviour and her Son. 
And another had she none? 
Yea: her Love's beloved — ^John. 

My readers are already acquainted with the 
volumes "An Octave to Mary" and "The 
Rosary in Verse," dedicated to her love. These 
rich offerings, however, were not enough for 
one who so often soared above the stars to be- 
hold her in her beauty. He portrays her from 
the beginning in 

[98] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION 

A Dew-drop of the darkness born, 

Wherein no shadow lies; 
The blossom of a barren thorn, 

Whereof no petal dies; 
A rainbow beauty passion-free, 
Wherewith was veiled divinity. 

The poet paints in sublime colors the "Fiat" 
of "The Annunciation," — "the flaming word" 
that brought the Eternal down to a Virgin's 
womb. And the mystery is retold in "The In- 
carnation." 

A weight to bow Thy Godhead to the ground. 
And lift to Heaven a lost humanity. 

We have had glimpses of the Mother's love- 
liness shrouded in the glory of her Babe in The 
Nativity; and we have stood with her under the 
Cross, suffused with emotions of awe and love 
such as stirred the depths of the poet's soul while 
he gazed and wrote. Yet see how he spans the 
heavens to call us again in worship to the Man- 
ger and the Cross in 

STABAT MATER 

The star that in His splendor hid her own 

At Christ's Nativity, 
Abides — a widowed satellite — alone 

On tearful Calvary. 

The triumph of his Queen, the crowning act 
of her Assumption into Heaven, the priest-poet 
hymns in more than one loving effusion. I 

[99l 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

quote a strain in which lowly imagery, wedded 
to celestial beauty, bears witness to the holy 
audacity of Love in treating of divine things, 
Love, grown familiar — spirit to spirit — with 
the high courts of the invisible world. 

THE ASSUMPTION 

Behold! the mother bird 

The Fledgeling's voice hath heard ! 

He calls anew, 
"It was thy breast 
That warmed the nest 

From whence I flew. 
Upon a loftier tree 
Of life I wait for thee ; 
Rise, mother-dove, and come, 
Thy Fledgeling calls thee home!" 

Father Tabb's passionate love of the Dogmas 
of the Church has found ardent utterance in his 
poems, as one is forced to confess; indeed, I 
almost dare to say they form his chief message. 
The priest chants in high and worthy and per- 
suasive verse the Eternal Truths, the deep mys- 
teries of the Faith: "God, the All in All," Im- 
mortality, the Creation, the Fall and Redemp- 
tion, the supreme love of God and of the 
neighbor. Heaven, hell (with shuddering beauty 
defending God's justice), and Purgatory, the 
Sacraments and the Virtues, the glories of the 
Priesthood and the Religious State. In truth, 
the harvest of heavenly wisdom garnered in 
these little sheaves of poesy is incalculable ; and 

[lOO] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

the Sovereign Truth to whom they arc conse- 
crated, as was the whole life of the poet, has 
shed into them the perfumed essence of heavenly 
grace, that unction we find so often in the writ- 
ings of saints and holy men. 

To that most loyal son of the Church, as to 
Francis Thompson, "the very arrangement of 
the liturgical year is a suggested epic, based as 
it is on a deep parallel between the evolution 
of the seasons and that of the Christian soul of 
the human race." 



[lOl] 



CHAPTER XXIII 

CONSIDERATION OF OTHER POEMS. TRAGEDY 
AND FANCY 

It has been said by one who studied under 
Father Tabb and knew him well that the sug- 
gestive possibilities of his verse are limited only 
by the capacity of the reader; and nothing 
could be truer, for one must study some of these 
gnomic verses as a problem — dig into them as 
into a mine to make them yield up all the pre- 
cious gems of thought, of fancy, of allusion, 
that lie hidden under the rich loam of word and 
phrase. 

What mighty epics have been wrecked by time 
Since Herrick launched his cockle-shells of rhyme ? 

sang Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and he himself 
floated a number of the same frail boats upon 
the sea of poesy. But I conceive that Herrick 
and Aldrich and many others of famous name, 
not excluding Richard Crashaw in his "Steps 
to the Temple," would veil their colors before 
Father Tabb's "cockle-shells" and without envy 
behold them far in the lead. 

Yet Father Tabb at times, though rarely, 
gave larger play to his thought. "A Sigh of the 
Sea," which I consider one of the most finished 

[102] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

allegories I know, is expanded to eight quat- 
rains; so also is "The Cloud," standing "above 
the eternal snows" — his first published effort, of 
which he remarked "God gave me the Cloud." 
Six enchanting quintets, varied in metre, are 
dedicated "To the Wood Robin," and the same 
number to "Echoes," for which the poet has 
lovingly appropriated the stanza of Shelley's 
"Ode to a Skylark," with perfect musical effect. 
In the third stanza he addresses them : 

Children of the distance, 

Shall I call in vain? 
From your slumbers waking, 

Speak to me again 
As erst in childhood woke your soft Aeolian strain ! 

And "The Swallow" "skims o'er the tide" in 
a brilliant craft of six sestets. 

Tragedy chants its note of human desolation 
in many of the noble quatrains, nowhere, to my 
mind, with greater poignancy than under the 
symbol of 

THE MAST 
The winds that once my playmates were 
No more my voice responsive hear, 
Nor know me, naked now and dumb, 
When o'er my wandering way they come. 

In "Giulio," a poem of rhymed couplets (iam- 
bic tetrameter) which reads with the ease of 
blank verse, Sorrow tells her tale with fuller 
utterance. Brief yet piercing, thirty-six lines 

[103] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

suggest two life histories, one "dead to all but 
misery!" — the other waiting 

The consecrating vow 
Of priesthood. 

How the poet has painted the agony of a sin- 
ning and repentant heart, merging at last into 
ecstatic joy at meeting with the loved one in 
the solemn hour of Death's anointing ! 

Fancy everywhere irradiates Father Tabb's 
pages, as we have seen. Here is a poem which 
lets us into the secret of her enchantment, an 
inspiration for an artist, and so dripping with 
melody that it seems, like many others, to have 
been composed to an inward music. 

FANCY 

A boat unmoored, wherein a dreamer lies, 
The slumberous waves low-lisping of a land 

Where Love, forever with unclouded eyes, 

Goes, wed with wandering Music, hand in hand. 

Here is a perfect creation of Fancy's deli- 
cate brush. Look at sound magically trans- 
formed into vision in 

WHISPER 

Close cleaving unto Silence, into sound 
She ventures as a timorous child from land. 

Still glancing, at each wary step, around, 
Lest suddenly she lose her sister's hand. 

[104] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

How fanciful is "The Mistl" Suddenly 
metamorphosed into the mythic Eurydice, she 
rises from the darkness with Orpheus, now the 
singing Lark 

That leads her to the Dawn 
With rhapsodies of star delight, 
Till looking backward in his flight 

He finds that she is gone. 

"Star delight?" a pupil questioned one day. 
"The poet perhaps suggests," I conjectured, 
"that as when Orpheus came up from the dark- 
ness of Erebus with his lost love, the sight of 
the starry heavens delighted him, so the stars 
are still in the sky, though shrinking away, 
as the Lark soars and sings in 'shrill de- 
light.' And Orpheus' lyre, you know, was set 
in the heavens by the ancients — the beautiful 
little Constellation, Lyra, 'with all its star-chord 
seven.' " But I fear my hints will not satisfy 
so readily some of the grown-ups who have 
cavilled at the obscurity of "The Mist." 

Father Tabb frankly plays with his imagery, 
but how often he rises from lovehest fancy to 
the deepest philosophy of life, as in 

THE SEA-BUBBLE 
Yea, a bubble though I be. 
Love, O man, that fashioned thee 
Of the dust, created me 
Not of earth, but of the sea: 
Kindred blossoms then are we — 
Time-blooms on eternity. 

[105] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

A tender fancy is hidden under the lines "To 
Violet B. on Her Wedding-Day": 

"Sweet it is for Love to live," 

Thus a Blossom whispered me, 
"But for Love a life to give 
(Tell my sister Violet — 
For a blossom, too, is she) 
Sweeter yet." 

Had Father Tabb chosen to enrich the world 
of music with songs of his inditing, what a 
prophecy of success he has bequeathed us in 
"Come to Me, Robin!" in "Fade Not Yet, O 
Summer Day!" and in 

Over the sea, over the sea. 
My love he is gone to a far countrie ; 
But he brake a golden ring with me, 
The pledge of his faith to be. 

We can well forego the songs of earth, how- 
ever, since our priest-poet has taught us sweet 
songs of the heavenly clime. 



[io6] 



CHAPTER XXIV 

THE SONNETS 

Many bards have sung the praises of the 
Sonnet: and Wordsworth in luminous lines re- 
minds us that 

with this key 
Shakespeare unlocked his heart ; the melody 
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound ; 
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound; 

and Gilder adds: 

This was the flame that shook with Dante's breath ; 
The solemn organ whereon Milton played. 

Few, indeed, among the "Enamored archi- 
tects of airy rhyme," of differing ages and liter- 
atures, have failed to test their powers upon this 
form of poetry which has outlasted seven cen- 
turies, and has invaded with its fairy or solemn 
or tragic touch every domain of knowledge, 
human and divine, every issue of life and death, 
of time and eternity. Yet, strange to say. 
Father Tabb held such an instinctive aversion 
to the sonnet — its complexities and restraints — 
that only through the unceasing importunities 
of a brother professor he was at last prevailed 
upon to overcome his repugnance. To this 
happy influence we owe some of the most per- 

[107] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

feet sonnets in the English language, too few, 
alas ! for there are only thirty, I believe, in all. 

The reader will find a pleasant suggestion of 
Shakespeare in several of these "little pictures 
painted well." Although intricate and elabo- 
rate in form, they speak to us the simple lan- 
guage of the heart. The rhymed octave is 
always regular; the sestet, is, in general, classic, 
yet, since there are no less than eighteen differ- 
ent ways in which a poet may lawfully adapt its 
two or three rhymes, one is not surprised to find 
Father Tabb adjusting the rhyme-order to the 
exigencies of his thought. Add to this his deli- 
cate management of the cesura, the climax gen- 
erally of octave and sestet, the singing quality 
of his verse, the unity which pervades every son- 
net, and, above all, the exalted realm of his 
thought, his fancy, and his personal sympathies, 
and who shall say that our poet-priest has not 
won unfading glory by touching, though reluct- 
antly, this sonnet-lyre with its fourteen golden 
strings ? 

Apart from the sacred sonnets I think my 
preference is for "Forecast," with its pictorial 
wealth of fancy and note of prophecy, which 
was surely verified in Father Tabb himself, who 
might well have been the babe upon whose spirit 

The dream, the song, the odor, each in one 
Upbreathing as a starry vapor, spread, 
And from the golden minarets of morn, 
Far heralding the unawakened sun, 
A rapture as of poesy outshed. 

[io8] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

"Solitude" spheres as much grief for the loved 
and lost in its fourteen lines of faultless rhythm, 
exquisite phrasing and imagery, and striking 
climax, as Tennyson's "In Memoriam." "Love's 
Retrospect," too, is a memorial urn, garlanded 
with flowers, touched with sunlight, and dewed 
with tears ; it consecrates a passing away of such 
moment to the poet that he could complain it 
had left 

a world henceforth to me 
In everlasting twilight. 

Earlier pages have presented to my readers 
characteristic quotations from the sonnets. 
"Ghmpses," "Daybreak," "The Dead Tree," 
abound in beauty and pathos; and "St. Afra 
to the Flames!" how exultantly she challenges 
them: 

Delay not ! Leap the barriers and fire 
The citadel, the heart. A flame is there 
To which your kiss is coldness. 

"Golgotha" and other of these art studies I 
must leave to the reader's quiet meditation, re- 
producing only a memory of the Night of Sor- 
row in "The Paschal Moon," which should be 
inscribed in letters of gold and read often by 
every heart that loves the Holy Hour. Note 
the strength and profound pathos of the first 
line, and the power and dignity of the double 
climax, rising to the sublime in the sestet. 

[109] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

THE PASCHAL MOON 

Thy face is whitened with remembered woe ; 
For thou alone, pale satellite, didst see, 
Amid the shadows of Gethsemane, 

The mingled cup of sacrifice o'erflow; 

Nor hadst the power of utterance to show 
The wasting wound of silent sympathy. 
Till sudden tides, obedient to thee. 

Sobbed, desolate in weltering anguish, low. 

The holy night returneth year by year; 

And, while the mystic vapors from thy rim 
Distil the dews, as from the Victim there 

The red drops trickled in the twilight dim. 
The ocean's changeless threnody we hear, 

And gaze upon thee as thou didst on Him. 



[no] 



CHAPTER XXV 

PERSONALITY OF THE POET 

A few paragraphs cited from a brief review 
of our poet by an intimate friend will supply a 
hiatus in these pages. 

"Poet, soldier, priest, Father Tabb united 
in one personality the qualities which distin- 
guished each individual calling. As a poet he 
was an idealist, seeing beauty and harmony in 
the lowHest as well as the highest things. As a 
soldier he was fearless and unswervingly loyal 
to the cause he had championed in his youth, 
while as a priest he was sympathetic and helpful 
to all with whom he came in contact. He pos- 
sessed the heart and faith of a little child, com- 
bined with the confidence in an ever-loving and 
watchful Providence that gave him courage to 
live joyously, yet at all times face death un- 
flinchingly. 

"In appearance Father Tabb was slender of 
figure, slightly above the medium height and 
quick of movement — an active man, who en- 
joyed long walks through the blossoming coun- 
try and whose eye and spirit were attuned to 
catch the beauty of every flower by the wayside. 

"In manner he was cordially responsive or 
shy and reserved, according to his intimacy with 

[xn] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

those with whom he was associating. About 
Ellicott City his face and figure were familiar 
to the entire community, with whom his rela- 
tions were cordial in the extreme. Into the 
homes of a few families of the neighborhood 
the poet came and went as the mood impelled 
him. Always a welcome guest, he here cast 
aside reserve and was frankly interested in the 
affairs of the day, ready to discuss with boyish 
enthusiasm topics light or serious, the last novel, 
the latest drama — for he now and again at- 
tended a good play — an inspiring concert or the 
affairs of the nation." 

I have .to confess that, lacking the interesting 
details of his life history, I have been compelled 
to look into his poems for revelations of him- 
self — of his inner life, of course, but also of 
his habits, and of external accidents and cir- 
cumstances. I know nothing more engrossing, 
more toil-begetting, more perplexing, than the 
study of a great poet through his poems; yet 
nothing more rewarding, more satisfying on the 
whole, though many of these products of his 
brain and heart may tantalize you with their 
indecipherable significance. What more obvious 
illustration is afforded than some of the Eliza- 
bethan writers, whose enigmatic lines conceal 
volumes of biography; startling, perplexing, 
irreconcilable to tradition, they often portray 
a whole inner and outer life. 

[iia] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

These pages have furnished to the reader 
more knowledge of the poet through his poems 
than through the paucity of my memoirs. Per- 
haps with a httle pleasant searching we may 
glean a few more grains of truth. 

"Matin-Song" pictures to us the opening of 
Father Tabb's day. He gave the dawning 
hours to God and counselled others to the prac- 
tice. It is well to learn the poem for its perfect 
beauty of thought and diction, and to obey its 
call, keeping the altar of the heart "free for 
sacrifice." With what authoritative earnestness 
the poet-priest utters the invitation ! 

MATIN-SONG 

Arise ! Arise ! 
Dawns not the day without thy wakening eyes ; 
The mist that on them lies 
Delays the blossom of the eastern skies. 
'Tis at their light alone the darkness flies, 
And Night, despairing, dies; 
Behold thine altar free for sacrifice! 

Arise ! Arise ! 

And yet how many poems announce that 
Father Tabb was a victim of insomnia ! "Sleep 
quiets all but me," he laments. In "The Agony," 
a perfect sonnet, he wrestles 

as did Jacob, till the dawn, 
With the reluctant Spirit of the Night 
That keeps the keys of Slumber. 

The Scriptural wrestling is carried out in ex- 
quisite detail, till at last the Angel 

[113] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

breathed upon my brow; 
And as the dew upon the twilight hill 

So on my spirit, overwearied now, 
Came tenderly the benediction. Sleep. 

"Insomnia" is a prayer. 

E'en this. Lord, Thou didst bless; 

For 'twas while others calmly slept around 
That Thou alone in sleeplessness wast found 
To comfort me. 

We may be pretty sure that under such re- 
current night watchings Father Tabb courted 
a siesta in the afternoon; so he seems to hint 
in the playful tableau, 

BARGAINS 

"What have you in your basket?" 

I questioned Mother Sleep. 
"Ah, many a golden casket 

Of jewel-dreams I keep 
At pastime prices for the friend 
Who's half an hour or more to spend." 

A hidden life, yet how fruitful in activities 
was his ! He husbanded the precious moments 
— valued the present as containing the whole of 
life. 

'Tis in the Present I am free 

The mental die to cast; 
The future yet of mastery 

Is palsied as the past; 
Between, the breathless balance still 
Awaits the hesitating will. 

[114] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

Among many current events that had an 
abiding interest for the poet we find 

DARIEN 

Thou partest sea from restless lover-sea 
That, yearning, dream and wait 

The wedding of their waters, soon to be, 
When Science opes the gate. 

I feel that I am treading on sacred ground 
when I venture into the temple of his memories. 
"The Departed" are very near and dear to 
him ; they cannot wholly pass away, 

For spirits in eternity, 

As shadows in the sun. 
Reach backward into time as we, 

Like lifted clouds, reach on. 

In "Retrospect," all his "old-time griefs" 
are seen in a new phase : memory transfigures 
them. 

For there, in reconcilement sweet, 

The human and divine, 
The loftiest and the lowliest, meet 

On Love's horizon-line. 

Now memory travels back to his Vita Nuova, 
and he interrogates "The Summer Wind" : 

Art thou the self-same wind that blew 
When I was but a boy? 

Its voice is sadder, perchance the echo of 
his own, he muses, now dwelling "beside a sea 

[115] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

of memories." And as loved ones come back 
under its spell, he questions in surprise : 

Are all the voices lost to me 

Still wandering the world with thee ? 

What a story of loneliness of heart, of thirst 
for sympathy from his fellows is intimated in 
"Exaltation!" He apostrophizes the "Leaf 
upon the highest bough, the Poet of the woods" 
— a symbol of himself and of all souls great in 
art. The second stanza reads: 

O leaf upon the topmost height, 
Amid thy heritage of light, 

Unsheltered by a shade, 
'Tis thine the loneliness to know 
That leans for sympathy below j 

Nor finds what it hath made. 

Who does not recall Michel Angelo, alone 

Amid his frescoes half divine, 

longing for a word of sympathy, of appreciation 
from a human being; and this failing, behold! 
he pulls his Crucifix from his breast, raises it 
aloft before his last wonderful creation, and 
asks beseechingly: "Is that not beautiful, my 
Lord?" This longing is the seal of the kinship 
of genius with his brother-man. 



[ii6] 



CHAPTER XXVI 

A SACRIFICE. "consecration" 

There is a group of poems that to me are 
redolent of the Incense of life's supreme sacri- 
fice. I consider they can have but one solu- 
tion — and that a heavenly one — ties rent wil- 
lingly that two souls might walk in a higher 
vocation, a parting till the eternal years. 
"Love's Autograph" reads: 

Once only did he pass my way. 

"When wilt thou come again? 
Ah, leave some token of thy stay!" 

He wrote (and vanished), "Pain." 

"An Influence" is permeated with a celestial 
loveliness : the symbol in the last stanza rises 
into sublimity with "a life's Hbation." 

I see thee — heaven's unclouded face 

A vacancy around thee made ; 
Its sunshine a subservient grace 

Thy lovelier light to shade. 

I feel thee as the billows feel 

A river freshening the brine; 
A life's libation poured to heal 

The bitterness of mine. 

I quote the poem "Consummation" without 
comment. It veils an experience that only the 
deep sympathetic insight of a rare reader, per- 
haps, can understand or interpret. 

[117] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

The interval 
We both recall, 
To each was all — 

A moment's space 
That time nor space 
Can e'er ejfface. 

'Tis all our own — 
A secret known 
To us alone: 

My life to thee, 
As thine to me, 
Eternity. 

It is not without an emotion of holy awe that 
we can take the poet's hand and enter with him, 
at his own solicitation, into the sanctuary where 
that solemn sacrifice of the heart is 

ENSHRINED 

Come quickly in and close the door, 
For none hath entered here before, 
The secret chamber set apart 
Within the cloister of the heart. 

Tread softly ! 'Tis the Holy Place 
Where memory meets face to face 
A sacred sorrow, felt of yore, 
But sleeping now forevermore. 

Love would not wake it, nor efface 
Of anguish one abiding trace, 
Since e'en the calm of Heaven were less. 
Untouched of human tenderness. 

[118] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

"Cloistered" adds another crystal stone to 
this edifice of conjecture: 

Within the compass of mine eyes 
Behold a lordly city lies — 

A world to me unknown, 
Save that along its crowded ways 
Moves one whose heart in other days 

Was mated to mine own. 

I ask no more; enough for me 
One heaven above us both to see, 

One calm horizon-line 
Around us, like a mystic ring 
That Love has set, encompassing 

That kindred life and mine. 

There are other poems and parts of poems in 
which these sublimated memories of the poet 
"are mirrored small in Paradise." An edifice 
of conjecture, I have conceded: yet it is not all 
conjecture to me, and I often wonder if the 
grave has closed over that 

secret known 
To us alone, 

and if only at the gates of eternity it shall be 
unfolded by the Angel of Sacrifice, with other 
heroic acts of immolation made by the poet- 
priest. 

There is a touchingly personal poem which 
has long been for me a source of perplexed 
study — "Consecration." An English critic 
said he would be grateful to anyone who would 
explain to him the first verse, which reads as 
follows : 

[119] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

The Twilight to my Star, 

Her hoary head 
A Hope receding far, 

To Life re-led. 

The "Twilight," "hoary head," suggested 
age. "My Star" just rising, was, of course, 
his youth. "My Star" could scarcely be "To 
Life re-led" ; but "her hoary head to Life re-led 
a Hope receding far," is easily comprehensible; 
the comma omitted after far would give this 
reading. With the punctuation as it stands, 
"Her hoary head" is made "A Hope receding 
far," which in my opinion cannot be made to 
harmonize with the context. 

My concern, however, was not with textual 
criticism. I ached to know who the dear "Twi- 
light" was. But first the reader must have the 
full text. 

The Twilight to my Star, 

Her hoary head 
A Hope receding far 

To Life re-led. 

Apart and poor I lay; 

My fevered frame 
Slow withering away, 

When soft she came, 

From comfort, to my care ; 

And Pity sweet 
Subdued her, kneeling there. 

To kiss my feet. 

[120] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

A Magdalen adored 

Her God in Thee :~ 
A greater love, O Lord, 

Anointed me. 

I wondered vainly if "Twilight" were the 
Mammy whom he so loved, or perhaps his 
mother, or an elderly relative. And was "his 
fevered frame slow withering away" after the 
horrors of his prison life? I could not cease 
admiring the tenderness and humility of the act 
recorded in the third stanza, — the last line itali- 
cized by the poet himself: 

And Pity sweet 
Subdued her, kneeling there. 
To kiss my feet. 

At last, just as this Kttle book is prepared 
for the press, the solution comes to me from a 
dear young friend of the poet. While teaching 
at Saint Paul's School, Baltimore, in 1868, 
young Professor Tabb became seriously ill of 
typhoid fever. He was removed to the home 
of Charles Herman, M. D., where every care 
and attention was lavished on him, especially 
by the doctor's aged mother, whose heart over- 
flowed with love and compassion for the South- 
ern youth. One day when the fever was at its 
height, she entered the sickroom and, believing 
herself undetected by the patient, who seemed 
asleep, the venerable old lady "kneeling there" 

[121] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

kissed his feet, and by her act, compared to 
Magdalen's, has immortalized herself most 
sweetly in "Consecration." 1 think the poet 
raises the poem to a climax in giving it so ex- 
alted a title. 



[122] 



CHAPTER XXVII 

THE poet's failing SIGHT 

An unpretentious little poem entitled "The 
Tree," written in 1905, in which I solicited of 
Father Tabb another harvest of fruit in a new 
book of poems, called forth the following re- 
sponse : 

"March 3, 1905. 

"Thank you, dear , for 'The Tree' 

which ... If you knew me personally you 
would never so idealize a poor old 'limb.' How 
very much enchantment a little distance lends! 
I am the last of my family now, my 
sister and the boy I love both being gone to, I 
hope, a happier world. All that has happened 
shows the goodness of God, for my loss is their 
gain. Remember them sometimes ! . . . 
The older I grow, the more am I impressed by 
the wonderful 'Ancient Mariner,' and I should 
like to be present at your lecture. May all suc- 
cess attend it ! 

"Yours in Christ faithfully, 

"John B. Tabb." 

His tender and protecting love for his sister 
is touchingly manifest in a previous letter (Jan- 
uary 5, 1903). 

[123] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

"Thank you, dear , for your cordial 

greeting, and know that you have my best 
wishes and blessing for the year just begun. 
My vacation was, for the most part, 
spent at my sister's bedside. She is a partial 
paralytic, and so helpless that she cannot stand 
alone. The summer is always most trying for 
her; so, except when I went to the Springs for 
my eyes, every vacation has been spent with her 
at home. Say a prayer for her sometimes." 

This intense brotherly love inspired some of 
his most pathetic poems. I think "Noche 
Triste," "The Night that Bore Me to my 
Dead," and "Consolation" were inscribed to her 
memory. Their union of heart and their perfect 
congeniality in regard to the spiritual and 
aesthetic relations of life made the great solace 
of his later years ; and her pride in him was pro- 
portioned to the depth of her sisterly affection. 
The "lecture" alluded to was an illustrated 
reading of Coleridge's poem by my pupils. 

Father Tabb refers to his failing sight in a 
letter of March, 1906. "My eyesight, dear 

, though better than it was, forbids me 

much more than my necessary work, and even 
this sometimes I have to postpone to *a more 
convenient season.' " 

It was evidently during this season that his 
prayerful attitude of soul toward his affliction 
as well as his painful balancing between hope 
and fear found expression in the pathetic poem, 

[124] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

FIAT LUX 

"Give us this day our daily bread," and light: 
For more to me, O Lord, than food is sight ; 

And I at noon have been 
In twilight, where my fellow-men were seen 
"As trees" that walked before me. E'en today 
From time to time there falls upon my way 
A feather of the darkness. But again 
It passes ; and amid the falling rain 
Of tears, I lift, O Lord, mine eyes to Thee, 

For lo! I see! 

The last lines in his own hand with which 
the poet favored me came penciled on a postal, 
the three central lines so intermingled that a 
powerful reading glass was necessary to locate 
the words, "20 July, '08. Your prayers, dear 

, have not kept me from the dark, but 

enable me to bear it with greater patience. 
How very few men can say that in the detrac- 
tion of daylight a great blessing too is theirs! 
God keep you and bring you closer to Himself 
prays daily, Always your friend in Xt, John 
B. Tabb." 

In the middle of August through a friend 
he gave this statement to the public press : "My 
sight nearly gone, I remain where I am — not 
as the faculty would generously have me, a pen- 
sioner of the college — but paying as long as I 
am able, full board. It is only to keep me from 
seeking some asylum that the faculty consents 
to my having my own way — the greatest kind- 
ness it can do me." 

[125I 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Later in the same year a postal, probably in 
the hand of one of his boys, brought me words 
of cheer: 

"Nov. 27, '08. 

"Thank you, dear , for your very 

kind letter. Thank God, I am able still to say 
the Mass daily — a blessing I may hope to have 
even in the dark. My dear boys leave nothing 
undone for my happiness, so do not imagine me 
gloomy or depressed. With blessing, and ask- 
ing your pious remembrance, I am always your 
friend in Christ, 

"John B. Tabs." 

(Signed in pencil by himself.) 

Father Tabb's poems had for many years 
been a sine qua non in my poetry classes. Only 
the poetry of the Bible or portions of the 
Shakespearean drama could elicit a greater 
share of enthusiasm. A morning with the poet- 
priest was a morning of perfect delight as well 
as of literary culture. During this and the pre- 
vious year his approaching blindness had 
wrought upon their sympathies ; and as Thanks- 
giving Day neared, desiring to pay him a little 
tribute of gratitude and respect, they united in 
purchasing a basket of fruit which they ex- 
pressed to him for that morning. The usual 
prompt answer (in an alien hand) bore them 
this message: 

[126] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

"Nov. 28, '08. 
"My dear young Friends : I have never 
before been willing to be judged by my fruits; 
but now, through your kindness, I could ask 
nothing better. With blessing, believe me very 
gratefully yours, 

"John B. Tabb." 

But to me came a letter deprecating "so 
costly a gift from your pupils." The closing 
lines were: "Please let nothing like it ever be 
done again, and make the girls know how grate- 
ful I am to them." 



[127] 



CHAPTER XXVIII 

BLINDNESS. DECLINE OF HEALTH 

The affliction that had been threatening our 
poet from early childhood, though long de- 
layed, had then come at last. He accepted its 
apparently intolerable conditions in a noble and 
resigned spirit. Partial helplessness was now 
his earthly lot, yet the soul that had loved soli- 
tude and communion with God and nature was 
now lifted into a mountain air of spirituality, 
where, though the agony of Gethsemane sweeps 
over the lower faculties, yet hope and love pre- 
vail, and maintain in the summit of the spirit 
the serene atmosphere in which the indwelling 
of God is known and enjoyed. His own word 
vouches for this in his poem "Going Blind," 
published in the Atlantic Monthly, through 
which the world first learned that its favorite 
poet sat in darkness. 

GOING BLIND 

Back to the primal gloom 

Where life began, 
As to my mother's womb 

Must I a man 
Return : 
Not to be born again, 

But to remain: 
And in the School of Darkness learn 
What mean 

The things unseen. 

[128] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

And the same assurance is reiterated in 
"Proximity." 

If closer to the Living Light 
In darkness let me stay. 

Memory had laid up a rich associational mass 
in the beauty and glory of nature, in the mental 
and spiritual treasures which he could still en- 
joy; and the friendship and love which clung to 
him from a multitude of admirers and friends 
was a pleasure and a solace; but he who had 
portrayed in deathless pictures the invisible 
glories of the saints, of the King and the Queen 
of Saints, took his chief delight now in closer 
companionship with them. His steps led him 
often to the Chapel, where his heart ever dwelt; 
and he still had the happiness of offering the 
daily Sacrifice of the Mass. He made his afflic- 
tion indeed a diadem upon his priestly brow. 

His joyous and optimistic spirit still led him 
as of old into the sunny fields of humor; he 
could even make merry with his blindness. One 
of his limericks refers to a current event of the 
year, and is entitled 

HIGH FLYERS 

There once were two brothers named Wright 
Who rose in aerial flight; 

But a poet I know 

That much higher could go, 
For he soared till he got out of sight. 

[129] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

His health in the meantime was persistently 
failing; he bore it philosophically, for death had 
no terrors for him. Indeed, the thought of 
death in its various aspects seemed to have a 
supreme attraction for his contemplative mind. 
His early poems proclaim that "Death is but 
a tenderness"; that it is "sweet to tired mor- 
tality;" and "The Gossip," "The Tollmen," 
and especially "My Messmate," which opens 
thus: 

Why fear thee, brother Death, 
That sharest, breath by breath, 
This brimming life of mine? 

make manifest the sweet relations that existed 
in his mind between Life and Death. But now 
the poems take on a deeper, more solemn note — 
there is a waiting, an expectancy, a keener reali- 
zation of the awe-sweet change at hand; the 
veil is falling; his eye glances from earth to 
Heaven and from the coming Blessedness back 
to the grave already yawning, full of "sunshine" 
to welcome him "Dust to Dust." 

"Later Poems," published posthumously, are 
fragrant with suggestions of death and immor- 
tality, of the resurrection, and of the glories of 
"Beatitude." 

Yet more than one reveals to us the poet's 
deep and feeling sense of his suffering and in- 
activity. Christ heartens him in 

[130] 



THE PRIEST-POET 



HELPLESSNESS 



In patience as in labour must thou be 

A follower of Me, 
Whose hands and feet, when most I wrought for thee, 

Were nailed unto a tree. 

Patience and hope dominate the lines "In 
Extremis" : 

Lord, as from Thy body bleeding. 
Wave by wave is life receding 

From these limbs of mine : 
As it drifts away from me 
To the everlasting sea. 

Blend it, Lord, with Thine. 

A personal note of solemn import is struck in 
the triad of stanzas of "The Vigil," "Stay for 
Me Here." In the song, "Fade Not Yet," we 
meet the truism : 

'Tis the darkened hours that prove 
Faith or faithlessness in love. 

The poet's consciousness of the nearer ap- 
proach of the pale Angel is intimated strik- 
ingly in "Death" : 

I passed him daily, but his eyes, 
On others musing, missed me. 

Till suddenly, with pale surprise, 

He caught and clasped and kissed me. 

Since then his long-averted glance 

Is fixed upon my countenance. 

[131] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

One of his latest gems, I think, was a little 
allegorical poem which bore the title 

IN BLINDNESS 

For me her life to consecrate, 

My Lady Light 
Within her shadowy convent gate 

Is lost to sight. 

I may not greet her; but a grace — 

A gleam divine — 
The rapture of her hidden face 

Suffuses mine. 

But the chimes of earth are growing faint and 
the harmonies of the Eternal Kingdom are al- 
ready sounding in his ears. In the light of the 
Divine Essence flowing into his spirit he sits 
with darkened sense and transmits to us a mes- 
sage from Heaven in 

BEATITUDE 

And is it well with thee? 

Ay, past all dreaming, well! 

For here we dwell 

Where none may weep. 
And Paradise is ours again to keep — 
The tree of Knowledge in the midst thereof. 



All round us angels be 
To guard the gateways, not with sword of flame. 
But fragrant breathings of the holy Name, 
That nevermore an after thought of sin 
May enter in. 

[132] 



CHAPTER XXIX 

DEATH OF FATHER TABB. FUNERAL EULOGY 

In the fall of 1909 the health of Father Tabb 
suffered a sensible diminution; and in November 
his illness — bronchial — became serious, his 
physical weakness and sufferings being aug- 
mented, it was thought, by the reaction of his 
helpless condition on his nerves. Yet his death 
on the 19th came as a shock to everyone. So 
much seemed yet in the power of the poet-priest 
to do for the glory of God and for his fellow- 
men, though "Light, the prime work of God, 
to him extinct." 

The last consolations of the Church had been 
his, yet death had not seemed so imminent. 
Only his physician was watching by his side 
that fateful night, when, at 1 1 o'clock, a sudden 
sinking spell came over him and in a few min- 
utes all was over. Sorrow and pain and dark- 
ness had passed away forever, O Father, Poet 
of God, 

and the beam 
Of everlasting morning woke upon 
Thy dazzled gaze, revealing one bj^ one 
Thy visions grown immortal in its gleam ! 

The funeral services were held at St. Charles 
College on November 21, after which the re- 
mains of the beloved poet-priest were borne to 

[133] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Richmond, Va., and consigned to their last rest- 
ing place in Hollywood Cemetery. The eulogy 
of Father Tabb's life and works was rightly 
spoken by one of his most gifted priest-pupils, 
the Reverend Daniel J. Connor, S. T. L., of St. 
Peter's Cathedral, Scranton, Pa. Through his 
gracious kindness I am enabled to place his 
noble estimate of the life and character of his 
beloved preceptor before my readers — an esti- 
mate in which heart and mind have blended 
their memories with a depth of appreciation and 
affectionate penetration rarely met with. I give 
it herewith : 

"How powerless does death seem in a case 
like this to win a real victory ! It was surely 
no violent transition by which the soul of 
Father Tabb passed from the temporal to the 
eternal. As an exiled spirit he seemed to tread 
the rough paths of earth, where most of us are 
content to find a home. It was never more than 
the thinnest veil that separated him from the 
invisible world, and hid from him the full mean- 
ing of those intimations far beyond, which he 
made the subjects of his meditation and his 
song. All nature was to him an apocalypse, — a 
partial revelation of the beauty that is eternal. 

'My God has hid Himself from me 
Behind whatever else I see,' 

he said, and in these words it is not only the 
poet that speaks, but the man as we all knew 

[134] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

him; and now by his death we do not feel that 
a life has been rudely interrupted, as in most 
cases involuntarily we do, but that rather it has 
been emancipated and intensified. 

"The world of spirit, which to him was as 
vivid as the world of sense, is surely no strange 
element for that ardent soul, which used material 
things not as realities, but as shadows and sym- 
bols. The worshiper has but passed from the 
portico into the temple. The light of faith 
which was a lamp to him has guided him safely 
through the darkness, and in his own beautiful 
words : 

'The beam 
Of everlasting morning wakes upon 
His dazzled gaze, revealing one by one 
His visions grown immortal in its gleam.' 

"But yet Father Tabb's death is an occasion 
of more than ordinary sorrow. In him the lit- 
erary world has lost a great genius, our Alma 
Mater has lost its chief ornament, and we have 
lost more than all — a true friend. As for the 
value to be attached to Father Tabb's contribu- 
tion to our literature, only the most discriminat- 
ing critics have as yet discovered and ungrudg- 
ingly allowed him the place he is destined to 
occupy among his contemporaries. The field of 
his art was a limited one, his muse having never 
aspired to anything more pretentious than the 
lyric, the song that is 

[135] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

'Brief to the ear, but long 
To love and memory,' 

but in his own province it is doubtful if he has 
ever been surpassed. 

"His work, however, was absolutely devoid 
of that garishness and boisterousness which win 
the quick applause. He said: 

'The noonday never knows, 
What names immortal are.' 

Like that other Catholic poet, Francis Thomp- 
son, who died a year ago, his name was the 
property of the few who are able to discern 
genius when it comes unheralded, and, as in his 
case, the world will no doubt be aroused to a 
sense of its loss only by the announcement of 
his death. 

' 'Tis night alone that shows 
How star surpasseth star.' 

"Nature endowed him abundantly with the 
gifts which make the poet. He was possessed 
first of all with a rare faculty of intuition, upon 
which, much more than upon reasoning, he de- 
pended as a guide, not only in detecting aesthetic 
values, but also in judging the characters and 
situations of every-day life. And well he might, 
for it was well nigh infallible. This keenness 
of perception enabled him to seize those more 
elusive phases of beauty, which are like revela- 
tions of our hidden selves, that only the true 
poet can make known to us. Then the exquisite 

[136] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

music of his verse, which is almost suggestive of 
some set melody, the sureness and felicity of his 
expression, the purity of his language, the mas- 
cuHnity of his thought, the utter artlessness, if 
I may say so, of his art — these qualities consti- 
tute his unassailable patent of nobility in the 
world of letters. 

"But Father Tabb, as he will always linger 
in our memory, was essentially a worshiper. 
His art was not an end, but a means. Poetry 
was for him not a substitution for religion, but 
an inspiration that made religion the more nec- 
essary. Although he worshiped at a thousand 
shrines, it was not the god of Pantheism, but 
the God of faith, the God of Revelation. Child 
of a generation content with the worship of 
nature, he rose above the limitations of their 
poetic creed; and true and responsive as he was 
to the art tendencies of his day, he was not a 
man to rest satisfied with tendencies, but went 
straight for the conclusions toward which they 
converged. 

"Like St. Augustine in a former age, his soul 
could never be contented with the vague mysti- 
cism in which literature is too often satisfied to 
rest as if there were no higher philosophy. He 
craved for personal and daily intercourse with 
his Maker and Saviour. He found in a strong, 
practical Christianity the fulfillment of these 
aspirations, which it is one of the highest charms 
of poetry of the past century to express; and 

[137] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

like another Augustine he could say to the in- 
tellects of his day, who made their religion con- 
sist of a kind of romantic but interminable and 
impractical quest of the Holy Grail : 'Quaerite 
quod quaeritis. Sed ibi non est ubi quaeritis.' 
His imagination could, it is true, detect God's 
dwelling in the light of setting suns, but his faith 
found a more real Presence in the light of the 
sanctuary lamp. His religion was not a senti- 
ment, but a service. It found its best expression 
not in beautiful verse, but in his heroic Chris- 
tian patience, his touching self-denial, his abso- 
lute and unreserved resignation to the will of 
God. 

"As to that one event of his life which meant 
so much to him, and to which most of us here 
owe the opportunity of knowing Father Tabb 
at all, his conversion to the Catholic Church, 
I feel utterly at a loss to speak. No one who 
has not himself taken the step can tell either the 
cost or the gain. Cost him it did without doubt. 
Like so many illustrious converts of the last cen- 
tury, and in obedience to the same intellectual 
impulse, Father Tabb unhesitatingly left com- 
panionships and associations from which one of 
his affectionate nature and strong attachments 
must have found it doubly hard to sever, and 
sought a home in the midst of strangers — 
strangers not only to him, but often to his tastes 
and sentiments and ideas. 

"Yet no one can say that he did not find what 

[138] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

he sought. He was content to lose his life, but 
we are all witnesses how abundantly he gained 
life by the sacrifices. If anyone ever found a 
home in the Church, Father Tabb certainly 
found one. Always a man of great spirituality, 
of deep religious earnestness, of strong faith 
and tender piety, he saw in Catholicity what his 
soul had longed for. Man was there treated 
as a supernatural being. Grace had its regular 
means of operation side by side with nature in 
a visible and imposing dispensation of Provi- 
dence, that seemed to be conducted in defiance 
of all the laws of history, but yet was willing to 
have its claims judged by the strictest historical 
canons. The great truths of Revelation were 
treated, not as something transcendental from 
which the human reason could not trust itself 
to draw conclusions, but as matters on which 
not only the reason, but the emotions might take 
hold, as naturally as the child loves its mother, 
and as safely as a friend puts confidence in a 
friend. Not only was there belief in the Real 
Presence, but that belief used the same matter- 
of-fact logic which we exercise in every-day 
affairs. Catholics, he saw, not only defended 
the dogma on principle, but paid visits to the 
Blessed Sacrament. They not only believed in 
the Communion of Saints, but they believed so 
genuinely, so frankly, as to ask the Saints for 
their intercession with God, and to pray for the 
souls of their departed friends. 

[139J 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

"What these Catholic devotions became to 
Father Tabb most of us well know, and those 
of us who did not know, knew their friend only 
partially. He was Catholic to his heart's core. 
As he himself expressed it to a priest only a few 
weeks since, who asked him the circumstances 
of his conversion: 'I was always a Catholic — 
born a Catholic. Whenever any doctrine of the 
Church was spoken of, I knew it was true as 
soon as I heard it. I would have been a mem- 
ber of the Church years before I was if I had 
learned what the Catholic doctrines were, and 
had known that they were taught and practiced 
in the Catholic Church.' When at last he did 
believe he believed with all his strength and ail 
his mind; and there is many a Catholic today 
among those who were taught their religion at 
their mother's knee, for whom Christ's presence 
on the altar, Mary's influence and authority in 
Heaven as the Mother of Jesus, the duty of 
assisting the Souls in Purgatory, took on a new 
meaning after they had met this amiable man of 
God, this gentle yet irresistible witness to the 
unseen. 

"What is more gratifying, however, for us to 
recall to day as we stand around the mortal re- 
mains of our friend is not what he got from 
religion, but what he gave in return. Chris- 
tianity is beautiful, but it is austere. The shadow 
of Calvary will obstinately throw its gloom over 
the happiness of every Thabor. Human life is 

[140] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

hard to idealize. Christianity alone has suc- 
ceeded in doing it, and she has done it not by 
escaping from the stern facts of mortal ex- 
istence or forgetting them, but by recognizing 
and embracing them with a well-tempered spirit, 
'Dispose thyself to patience rather than to con- 
solation,' says the Following of Christ, 'and to 
carrying the Cross rather than to gladness' ; and 
it is the only philosophy that has stood the test 
successfully. The world is full of quixotic 
plans for a Millenium, and they would all be- 
gin by changing conditions. The Saints, on the 
contrary, ended by changing conditions about 
them, but they began by meeting them, by bow- 
ing to them as the inscrutable dispensations of 
an All-Holy Will, that needs not our genius or 
our talent, but only our obedience and our docil- 
ity, to accomplish its blessed purpose, as in- 
fallible on earth as in Heaven. 

"Few men have been more deeply impressed 
with the reality of Divine Providence than 
Father Tabb, or have paid it a more sincere or 
a more generous homage by their lives. The 
presence of God was to him the most luminous 
of truths. The will of God was the medium 
through which he looked at whatever befell 
him, and the thought that reconciled him to all 
the asperities of his lot, and enabled him to bear 
them with a cheerfulness and quiet patience that 
will ever be a precious memory to the friends 
that witnessed them. His resignation under 

[141] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

that last great affliction which darkened his de- 
clining days among us was the fortitude of per- 
fect Christian faith. 'I have seen a St. Paul in 
chains,' was the exclamation of Ignatius' friends 
after visiting him in his prison at Salamanca. 
It was also my sentiment a few months ago, 
when I came out to St. Charles after hav- 
ing heard of Father Tabb's total and irre- 
parable loss of eyesight. In reply to my in- 
quiries he answered that he was never happier 
in all his life. Not a doubt now remained in 
his mind of what God wished of him. 'And,' he 
added, 'if the Almighty came to me and said: 
"John Tabb, you can have your eyesight back 
by asking for it," I would not ask. I would be 
afraid of proving unfaithful to responsibilities 
of which I might not be fully aware. Now I 
know perfectly what is God's will, and I am 
resigned to it.' 

"I have said that Father Tabb's religion con- 
sisted not in sentiment, but service. The same 
was characteristic of his friendship. He con- 
sidered no sacrifice of himself too great, no 
demand upon his time or his means too large, 
no personal concern or disappointment or aspi- 
ration too trivial, no necessities of sickness too 
repulsive, when it was question of his friends. 
His loyalty resembled more the unselfishness 
and disinterestedness of a woman's devotion 
than any quality we are accustomed to find in 
man's love for man. 

[142] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

'If my grief his guerdon be, 

My dark his light, 
I count each loss felicity. 

And bless the night,' 

was the deliberate and unexaggerated expres- 
sion of the affection he bestowed on those he 
loved. 

"One word more. It is a great privilege to 
stand here as spokesman for Father Tabb's 
friends on this occasion and give utterance to 
these few thoughts, which are not my sentiments 
only, but the feelings, I am sure, of all who 
knew him well; and I wish to use it for the one 
purpose of asking those prayers, which we owe 
to the deceased as friend, teacher, and, above 
all, as the gentle influence that entered into the 
spring tide of our lives like a benediction from 
Heaven and molded our sentiments and char- 
acters more than we are aware. Father Tabb's 
friendship did not cease at the brink of the 
grave; Death but gave him a fuller oppor- 
tunity of proving its steadfastness and devo- 
tion. One of the greatest consolations of his 
priesthood was the power it gave him of offering 
the Holy Sacrifice for his departed dear ones. 
And though his modesty would deprecate every 
other sentiment to which I have given expres- 
sion, this one, I know, his own lips would utter 
were they not deprived of the power: 'Have 
pity on me, at least you, O my friends, for the 
hand of the Lord has touched me.' " 

[143] 



CHAPTER XXX 

SUPPLEMENTARY. FATHER TABB's SERMON ON 
THE ASSUMPTION 

After having completed the foregoing sketch 
of the venerated priest-poet, Father John Ban- 
nister Tabb, I had the good fortune to discover 
a sermon dehvered by him in Virginia on August 
15, 1894, the theme being "The Assumption of 
the Blessed Virgin." It is the only piece of his 
prose writing I have ever seen in print; and its 
beauty of diction, its manifestation of ardent 
love and devotion to the Mother of God, and 
the clear exposition it contains of the doctrine 
of the Assumption, both by logic and by analogy, 
assure me that my readers will esteem this ser- 
mon a happy finish to the considerations they 
have been asked to make upon the life and 
poems of the saintly author. 

We are indebted for this solitary specimen 
of his powerful and persuasive prose to the 
Reverend Michael J. Ahern, of Old Point Com- 
fort, a pupil and dear friend of Father Tabb, 
and, like him, a son of the Old Dominion, who, 
after a possession of twenty years, recently sent 
the sermon to his friends and former fellow- 
students of St. Charles College, the present Rev- 
erend Editors of the Baltimore Catholic Re- 
view. It was published In the issue of August 

[144I 



THE PRIEST-POET 

22, 1 9 14, where I saw it. There were some 
missing lines, however, and I was emboldened 
to write to Father Ahern for their recovery. 
My reward was a tasteful booklet containing 
the sermon printed under his own supervision, 
the cover bearing beneath the title and author's 
name Father Tabb's cherished quatrain on "The 
Assumption." 

Nor Bethlehem nor Nazareth 

Apart from Mary's care ; 
Nor heaven itself a home for Him 

Were not His mother there. 

Father Ahern writes: "I found the holo- 
graph manuscript of Father Tabb's sermon on 
the Assumption in one of Newman's works; I 
think it was 'Loss and Gain.' Father Tabb 
wrote the quatrain (which served him for a 
text) in my room at old St. Peter's Cathedral. 
At that time I happened to be secretary to the 
late Bishop Van de Vyver and had invited 
Father Tabb to keep up his good habit of 
preaching on Lady Day. 

"As he was always fond of me, he gladly con- 
sented and hence this gem. I asked him for 
the manuscript, and much against his wont he 
gave it to me. At Father Ed. Mickle's Jubilee 
I mentioned that I had the sermon to Bishop 
Donohue, Msgr. Starr, Msgr. Russell and 
Father Shandelle, S. J., and they were of one 
mind that I should have it published. I did so." 

[i4Sl 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

SERMON ON THE ASSUMPTION 
Delivered by Father Tabh August 15, 1894 

The meaning of the feast of the Assumption 
is this : that the body, as well as the soul, of the 
Blessed Virgin has been taken up to Heaven; 
that what will be done for the least of God's 
saints in the general resurrection, has been done 
for her already. This, and this only, is the 
meaning of the mystery. 

But a short time ago a meeting was held in 
the State of Virginia, to which even the Presi- 
dent of the United States considered it a privi- 
lege to receive an invitation, and the object of 
this gathering at Fredericksburg was to honor 
the long-neglected grave of a woman named 
Mary — the mother of George Washington. 

Suppose, when this project was planned, that 
some one had raised this objection: that to show 
such respect to the memory of the mother was 
an insult to her son; would not people — men, 
women and children, have scouted this idea ? 

"But what," the objector might urge, "did 
Mary Washington ever do for this people? 
She never led our armies nor directed our af- 
fairs. 'Twas her son that secured us our liber- 
ties, not she." "True," we should answer, "but 
like mother, like child, and it was to his mother, 
as Washington well knew, that he owed his best 
qualities. The influence of his father he could 

[146] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

hardly remember; and had not his mother di- 
rected his course, he would never have been 
what he was, nor have done what he did for 
his country. As the tree is known by the fruit, 
so the parent is known by the child; and in this 
case the training of the mother alone bore its 
fruit in her son." 

Such is the warrant we should claim for our 
conduct in the recent celebration; and such is the 
warrant that the Church claims today in paying 
her homage to the Mother of God. 

The analogy is close. The common run of 
men bear the stamp of both parents. It was 
less so with Washington, who hardly knew his 
father; and not so at all with Our Lord Jesus 
Christ, who on earth had no father. His hu- 
manity came from his Mother alone. "He was 
conceived of the Holy Ghost ; born of the Virgin 
Mary." His virginal flesh was the fruit of a 
Virgin : His whole human nature was the off- 
spring of hers. If, then, we honor the mother 
of Washington, shall we not, following the self- 
same path, come to the honor of the Mother of 
God? 

Consider it more closely: God, had He 
willed it so, might have created a new man, like 
Adam, from the dust of the earth. He could 
make the very stones of the street, as He tells 
us, raise up children unto Abraham. But He 
did not so will. As He spake by the mouth of 
His holy prophet, "A Virgin shall conceive and 

[147] 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

bear a Son, and shall call His name Emmanuel." 
Behold, what a mother! Virginity her birth- 
right and Motherhood her dower, and out of 
both a priceless possession of God as no other 
could possess Him ! His flesh is her flesh, and 
her flesh alone, as no other child's could be that 
had an earthly father. Bone of her bone, and 
flesh of her flesh; closer than wedlock is the 
union between them. But this fact reaches far- 
ther. The motherhood of Mary was to bring 
God on earth. "A Virgin shall conceive and 
bear a Son, and shall call His name Emmanuel 
— God with us." 

But in His Divine nature there is no change. 
He is and was everywhere before the Incarna- 
tion as He was and is now. The fact, then, 
that He is brought nearer to us is in virtue of 
His humanity; and hence it is that when He is 
one with His Mother, then, and then only, is 
He made one with us. 

"It behooved Him to suffer," says St. Paul, 
"for our salvation"; but the power to feel suf- 
fering, much less to die, was impossible even to 
the Almighty God, except through that nature 
that His Mother bestowed. Nor does Mary's 
claim to our reverence stop here. What she 
was to her Son in the order of generation she 
was destined to be also in the order of influence. 
Had she died at the time of Our Blessed Lord's 
birth, she had fulfilled the prophecy. The Vir- 
gin had conceived and borne a Son ; Emmanuel 

[148] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

was with us ; the Incarnation was accomplished. 
But it was not so to be. She was to think for 
Him, speak for Him, act for Him; wrap Him 
in swaddling clothes and lay Him in the man- 
ger; flee with Him from Herod, and bring Him 
back from Egypt; find Him in the Temple and 
return with Him to, Nazareth, where for thirty 
years He is subject to her. Nay; she must fol- 
low Him even unto Calvary, and stand in that 
darkness at the foot of the Cross, that her's, the 
first face He had looked upon on earth, might 
be also the last. 

Thus did our Blessed Lord make himself a 
debtor to the Mother He had chosen. And 
what shall be her recompense? 

If the servant that had faithfully used the 
two talents was put over five cities, and he that 
used five talents ruled over ten, what reward 
shall our Blessed Lord give unto His Mother, 
to whom was entrusted, not the treasure of this 
world, but the unreserved guardianship of His 
own Divine Person? Shall he not do for her 
all and much more than He ever did for others ? 
Yet Enoch and Elias had been bodily trans- 
lated. The son of the widow, the daughter of 
the ruler, the servant of the centurion had been 
raised from the dead; and Lazarus, after four 
days' corruption of the grave, had been called 
back to life again. What, then, remains to be 
done for His Mother? 

[149I 



JOHN BANNISTER TABB 

Even had tradition taught us nothing of this 
feast, would it not seem a necessity of love that 
where her Son's body was, hers should be also? 
It was sin that broke the union of body and soul 
that God had joined together. But in her was 
no sin. She had paid indeed the penalty as her 
Son himself had done, and why should her spot- 
less flesh linger in the tomb? He had hastened 
the hour of His own Resurrection; why should 
He not anticipate the time of His Mother's, 
for whom, though He told her His hour was 
not come, He had wrought His first miracle? 
It was but to give her a privilege beforehand 
that all were to have in the general resurrection. 
Why delay it till then? 

An Apostle had said to Him once upon earth : 
"Lord, show us the Father," and may we not 
think that the citizens of Heaven, adoring the 
Humanity at the right hand of God, might ask 
of Him, "Show us thy Mother, O Lord! Thy 
nature is twofold, and we see but one source 
of it. Show us the Blessed Mother from whom 
the other came. We will say to her, 'Hail ! full 
of grace!' as did Gabriel; we will cry, as did 
Elizabeth, 'Whence is this to us!' As among 
women, we would call her blessed here; for to 
which of the angels canst thou say 'Thou art my 
Mother?'" And would not His own Heart 
have prompted the request? After His own 
suffering and death in this world, it seemed but 
the least He could do for His Father to ascend 

[150] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

to Him in Heaven; and now when her course 
is accomplished on earth, it seems but the least 
He could do for His Mother to take her home 
with Him. Has He forgotten Bethlehem? Has 
He forgotten Nazareth? Is Heaven itself a 
home for Him in the absence of His Mother? 
She sleeps, but her heart waketh I Shall He 
not shorten the time of her sleep? "Arise, my 
beloved, my fair one, my dove," are the words 
of His canticle. "Let us go hence together! 
The winter is past!" 

And she in the joy of awakening, exclaims: 
"Behold, I come quickly ! Yea : let us go hence ! 
The wings of the morning are awaiting us ! 
Let us rise as did the turtle doves I offered in 
Thy Childhood and flee unto Thy mountain, 
my God and my Son !" 

Deo gratias. 



151 1 



CHAPTER XXXI 

A MEMORIAL TO THE POET-PRIEST 

Almost six years have elapsed since the saintly 
priest-poet, Father Tabb, went to receive the 
''crown of justice" from the Lord whom he had 
so faithfully served. 

His memory has not faded away; he still 
lives in the hearts of thousands whom he bene- 
fited. iSt. Charles College still breathes of his 
presence. In many a pulpit voices are raised in 
defense of the faith that are now pregnant with 
power because of his cultured teachings. 

It is a matter of surprise, therefore, that there 
has been no movement as yet to create a 
Memorial Father Tabb Scholarship for stu- 
dents at St. Charles College, the institution so 
dear to his heart, so embalmed with his pres- 
ence for thirty-five years as professor, priest 
and poet. 

No tribute to his memory could be more 
grateful to Father Tabb. A poet's lovers and 
admirers hasten after his death to erect a statue 
of their favorite, or a monument or tablet en- 
chased with his name, with a panegyric of his 
worth, that the eyes of men may witness to a 
love which extends beyond the grave — a loyalty 
that can cheat even death of the beauty and 
grace of its beloved and keep his name and 

[152] 



THE PRIEST-POET 

fame ever alive in the hearts of men. How 
beautiful is this — an honor to some of the 
noblest traits of human nature ! But to raise 
a spiritual memorial to the beloved dead for 
the eyes of God and His angels ! to place under 
the sheltering roof of God's temple a soul that 
longs "to serve Him in holiness and justice all 
the days of his life," a soul that shall raise 
daily to Him the Sacred Victim of our altars, 
shall spend himself for the conversion and 
guidance of souls in the way of truth and sanc- 
tity — what more glorious to God than an offer- 
ing like this — what more precious to His Holy 
Church than such an ever-living memorial of her 
departed Levite ! 

It seems to me that only the suggestion is 
necessary to Father Tabb's friends to set the 
wheels of liberality in motion toward this great 
end. For a consummation so devoutly to be 
wished we rely not alone on the long procession 
of grateful and appreciative students whom 
Father Tabb so ably led through the pleasant 
paths of literature, not alone on his brethren 
of the priesthood to whom his life and writings 
were an honor, not alone on the hosts of friends 
so near and dear to his heart; with equal cer- 
tainty of response we may appeal to the wide 
circle of his readers, who for long years have 
derived untold pleasure from the poems, have 
been uplifted, taught and made better by the 
heavenly influence of John Bannister Tabb. 

[153] 



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